For future reference: Daniel Stone dispels myths about “great” X is and why it’s actually former X maintainers that designed and implemented Wayland.
Tag: Insights
About Files
Simon Pitt writes how we have moved away from files as a representation of data and how we may have lost some freedoms on the way and gained weird new habits.
Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
Multi-step Refactoring Pains in C++
Titus Winters talks about maintaining and refactoring large C++ code bases (i.e. code bodies that require multi-step refactoring). He describes how “higher-level” language features effectively make refactoring harder (e.g. functions, classes, templates, concepts).
Usefulness of Swap Explained
Chris Down explains how swap’s main role is being the missing backing store for anonymous (i.e. allocated by malloc
) pages. While all other kinds of data (e.g. paged-in files) can be reclaimed easily and later reloaded, because their “source of truth” is elsewhere. There’s no such source for anonymous pages hence these pages can “never” be reclaimed unless there’s swap space available (even if those pages aren’t “hot”).
Linux has historically had poor swap (and by extension OOM) handling with few and imprecise means for configuration. Chris describes the behavior of a machine with and without swap in different scenarios of memory contention. He thinks that poor swap performance is caused by having a poor measure of “memory pressure.” He explains how work on cgroups v2 might give the kernel (and thus admins) better measures for memory pressure and knobs for dealing with it.
6 weeks without the big 5
Kashmir Hill went 6 weeks without the big 5 tech giants (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple). It seems you basically have to become a level 5 vegan especially if you also avoid anything hosted/using their cloud services (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCloud).
Wrestling with the Python
Sometimes Python makes some useful things unnecessarily complex for weird and inconsistent reason … e.g. “code blocks.”
ECCploiting with Rowhammer
Certain types of ECC RAM can also be exploited with Rowhammer. ?
ZIO Pipeline
This is an awesome talk for nerding out on ZFS interna. ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkA5HhfzsvM
Threads on async
If you were to design a threading library today how would it look like? David Beazley manages to demonstrate a lot of edge cases in tiny examples … while live-coding! ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOyJiN3yGfU
systemd from BSD
A remarkably sober analysis of what problem systemd solves for Linux … at a BSD conference of all places. ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY