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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • By the time you’re ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They’ve already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don’t know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.

    Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.

    I’m not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I’ve been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it’s definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.



  • Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.

    Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.









  • I would have liked perhaps a more distribution agnostic method of running NVMe-TCP in a way that the OS would not have to be booted.

    From the pull request:

    This all requires that the target mode stuff is included in the initrd of course. And the system will the stay in the initrd forever.

    I think that’s as minimal a boot target as you can reasonably get, or in other words you’re as far away from booting the OS as you can get.

    So now the question is whether this uses any systemd-specific interfaces beyond the .service and .target files. If not, it should not take much effort to create a wrapper init script for the executable and run it on non systemd distros.



  • You can argue that “open source” can mean other things that what the OSI defined it to mean, but the truth of the matter is that almost everyone thinks of the OSI or similar definition when they talk about “open source”. Insisting on using the term this way is deliberately misleading. Even your own links don’t support your argument.

    A bit further down in the Wikipedia page is this:

    Main article: Open-source software

    Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use for any (including commercial) purpose, or modification from its original design.

    And if you go to the main article, it is apparent that the OSI definition is treated as the de fact definition of open source. I’m not going to quote everything, but here are examples of this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Definitions
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_versus_source-available

    And from Red Hat, literally the first sentence

    Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

    What makes software open source?

    And if we follow that link:

    In actuality, neither free software nor open source software denote anything about cost—both kinds of software can be legally sold or given away.

    But the Red Hat page is a bad source anyway because it is written like a short intro and not a formal definition of the concept. Taking a random sentence from it and arguing that it doesn’t mention distribution makes no sense.

    Here is a more comprehensive page from Red Hat, that clearly states that they evaluate whether a license is open source based on OSI and the FSF definitions.


  • prageru is a known disinformation platform. That link is worthless.

    The ongoing war in Gaza, is HAMAS against Israel.

    And what about the Palestinian lands that are occupied and the Palestinians that were uprooted from there? What about the Palestinians that have been killed by Israel? The recent events might have been HAMAS, but historically this is a Palestine-Israel conflict. If you can’t be bothered to learn and understand the context, why comment at all?


  • I hate partitions. Moving and resizing partitions is not fun if you don’t correctly predict exactly the amount of space you need. If you really want the modularity, use btrfs subvolumes instead. IMPORTANT: While it is definitely feasible, ability to retain subvolumes might depend on the distro installer! Check before you commit to this approach!

    Also, consider using LVM or multi-device btrfs to make the drives act as one filesystem. This means that you will never have to worry about where to place your files to balance the load, but it might make removing/replacing a drive in the future harder.





  • Thanks for the explanation. I don’t really know how flash storage works. The fundamental idea of the problem I described would still apply, though as long as the input block size for dd extends to more than one page of the underlying storage.

    For example, say that exactly three pages fit in a block. If dd attempts to read pages A, B and C (ABC) and fails to read B, you would want the corresponding part zeroed in the output to preserve the offsets of all the other pages (A0C). But instead dd reads whatever it can for the entire block, then pads the rest of the block size with zeroes, effectively moving C forward (AC0). So essentially you magnify errors.