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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • I work with SoC suppliers, including Qualcomm and can confirm; you need to sign an NDA to get a highly patched old orphaned kernel, often with drivers that are provided only as precompiled binaries, preventing you updating the kernel yourself.

    If you want that source code, you need to also pay a lot of money yearly to be a Qualcomm partner and even then you still might not have access to the sources for all the binaries you use. Even when you do get the sources, don’t expect them to be updated for new kernel compatibility; you’ve gotta do that yourself.

    Many other manufacturers do this as well, but few are as bad. The environment is getting better, but it seems to be a feature that many large manufacturers feel they can live without.








  • I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

    • your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.

    • use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.


  • The difficulty is that a VPN isn’t just a product like ProtonVPN, it’s a huge family of software and protocols.

    You can block vpn.protonvpn.com, but since most operating systems come with VPN functionality out of the box, you’d have to start listening to all traffic (not just DNS lookups) and blocking ALL packets that might be VPN traffic without causing regular disruption to non-vpn traffic.

    TL;DR: it’s easy to prevent unmotivated users from downloading a VPN app. It’s practically impossible to block a motivated user from using a VPN, and they’re the users you particularly care about.



  • hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

    I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

    I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

    I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.


  • It opens the door to more manufacturers since there is no ISA licence fees. While the AMD/Intel duopoly is being fairly competitive at the moment, it really doesn’t have to be. Only think back to how bad it was late 2000s to 2015.

    I imagine a plethora of core designers, soc vendors and platform creators filling their own niches; lowest cost, lowest power, HW accelerators, highest core count etc.

    I don’t see the raw performance of AMD/Intel being surpassed soon, just because of the sheer total R&D years each has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas better suited to a different architectural approach.







  • NT is not the majority of windows code though; for windows to be multi architecture, all of windows needs to work with the new architecture; NT, drivers & userspace.

    For Linux, if an existing userspace application doesn’t work in aarch64, somebody somewhere will build a port. For windows, so much of their stuff is proprietary that Microsoft are the only ones able to build that port.

    Not because “windows bad”, just a consequence of such a locked down system which doesn’t have anything open source to inherit.


  • Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don’t see it being used widely there for a while.

    In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a shitty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn’t require months of trawling through to fix issues.

    Now that I think about it, in 10 years I’ll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere…