from the 640k-is-more-memory-than-anyone-will-ever-need dept.
Linux x86/x86_64 Will Now Always Reserve The First 1MB Of RAM - Phoronix:
The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM.
[...] The motivation now for Linux 5.13 in getting that 1MB unconditional reservation in place for Linux x86/x86_64 stems from a bug report around an AMD Ryzen system being unbootable on Linux 5.13 since the change to consolidate their early memory reservations handling. Just unconditionally doing the first 1MB makes things much simpler to handle.
The change was sent in this morning as part of x86/urgent. "Do away with all the wankery of reserving X amount of memory in the first megabyte to prevent BIOS corrupting it and simply and unconditionally reserve the whole first megabyte."
no more wankery
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:06PM (14 children)
Why is systemd still a thing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:27PM (12 children)
You can choose not to use it. Slackware doesn't have it and Gentoo has it only as an option.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:08PM (6 children)
That doesn't protect your system from all the undocumented opcodes and other fuckery the Jews bake into their processors and chipsets. And just in time for mass ransomware attacks that we all must "get used to." Jews must be hard-up for extra avenues of money-laundering now that there's a bigger spotlight on their human trafficking since BiBi's blackmail network was shut down.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:15PM (5 children)
Gee whiz. You help the Romans execute just *one* messiah and you never hear the end of it. Let it go, man.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:03PM (1 child)
Jewsus never existed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:44PM
Yes he did, just not in the first 1mb of Rome.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Monday June 07 2021, @09:01AM
No, you're thinking of the Dead Messiah Sketch: "The only reason that he had been up on that cross in the first place was that he had been NAILED there...".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:57PM (1 child)
Welease bwian!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:10PM
so he can wun Weal-time on Windows!
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36PM (4 children)
And there are many more distros without systemd, and several that allow you to install the OS without it.
https://nosystemd.org/ [nosystemd.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_distributions_without_systemd [wikipedia.org]
I'm having great success with Alpine, for servers. Not sure how much effort it might take to make it smooth / easy for general desktop use.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:29AM (3 children)
We would love to love Alpine, but we've run into weird bugs, unexpected undefined behavior, and library incompatibility because of their use of musl.
That said, we also try to use runit where we can, even in places where it isn't the init process as well. That is a nice and easily understood ecosystem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday June 07 2021, @04:14PM (2 children)
Thank you. I wasn't aware of musl. I've only installed Alpine and its apps, and was completely unaware of (ignorant of) musl. It looks very interesting, and may be why Alpine is so stable and efficient... I'll have to study it some more.
So do you have problems when installing 3rd-party applications (which were compiled against whatever the standard glibc is)?
Alpine comes with xen- could you use Alpine as your hypervisor + server and install another distro as guest vm for your glibc apps?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @01:38AM (1 child)
Yes, there can be problems using a libc that the person didn't test against. Most people use glibc but usually stick to the standard, which means that problems don't happen even if they switch to another. However within the libc arena, you have behaviors that are not dictated by the specification and developers may expect the behavior they got in testing. There are also things that musl doesn't implement or does erroneously that can also cause problems. Additionally, there are things that glibc, the most common libc, does wrong but developers may also wrongly depend on that behavior without realizing it is technically a bug in glibc.
There are ways around it. You can statically compile, using virtualization, using a compatibility layer, root separation or sandboxing, compiling it yourself, fixing the problematic code, and probably more that don't immediately come to mind. But not all of those are options in every situation; and not all are a solution in every situation, And others require extra work on top of using Alpine that can be fixed in the same or less work by not using Alpine in the first place as your distro.
As I said, we'd love to love alpine, but having been "fooled" before we are not looking forward to being fooled again because then it is our fault.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday June 09 2021, @02:43AM
Thank you so much. Very interesting perspective. It's interesting that you feel "fooled". I've found Alpine to be so good, stable, fast, efficient, that for me, it's the standard of excellence. But I understand what you mean. It's certainly a learning (eye-opening) experience.
Again, I have not tried to run any apps outside of what you can get from Alpine.
But I've had your problem with many applications for many distros, and I'm trying to think about what I've done with other distros. I think I usually get the distro-specific apps. If I need something that isn't available for the OS platform, I've probably gotten source and compiled. But that doesn't always work, and although I've done some SW development, I usually don't have the patience to figure it out and fix it. All depends on what the bug is, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:06PM
or shitty closed source bioses. Why isn't core/libre boot on everything. hardware vendors are disgusting fucks.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:17PM (11 children)
Wasn't so long ago that 1MB of RAM was an unthinkably large resource pool, more than the 640KB that we all know is "all the memory your average user will ever need."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:46PM (3 children)
had to go thru some hoops and loops with himem.sys and emm386.exe to get that WingCommander II thingy to work, lol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:32AM
*snigger* himem
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @02:11AM
F-that, we went for the PharLap 32 bit compiler as soon as it was available.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday June 07 2021, @03:13PM
Those were the days - I used to have a config.sys "multiboot" that would let me pick several different levels from "maximum compatibility and functionality" to "absolute minimum drivers with all the himem, etc wankery" to get those huge memory hogs running smooth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 07 2021, @12:04PM (1 child)
I downloaded the SLS floppy disk set from a local BBS in the fall of 93 and booted linux on a 40 mhz 386 with 4 megs ram as a student.
Kernel compilation required a bit more than 4 megs so with swapping it took like an hour to compile the kernel. So my board had 8 memory slots (back when you had to use four 8-bit simms to get 32 bits wide) so I stuck some old 256K simms in the empty slots giving me 5 megs and kernel compile times dropped to something like 15 minutes due to much less swapping.
Anyway back in the old days of linux even one meg counted and was important.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @03:11PM
I think my first install was Slackware (no idea which version) from CD Roms around-about 95/96. I remember that it would boot up once, into a graphical desktop, and connect to our dialup ISP, run Mozilla, and browse the 35 or so available websites at the time ;-) Yes, there were more than that, but anyway... the real kicker was: on 2nd boot, Slackware wouldn't do the SLIP/PPP or whatever it was thing anymore. I spent about 6 days across the span of 3 months trying to get it to go, read all the available help, reinstalled from scratch, and each time it would work on first boot and never again. At which point I filed this "Linux thing" under: Not ready for prime time, and didn't revisit it until MinGW in ~2002, Gentoo in ~2005 (the only true 64 bit OS available at the time), and by 2007 I had migrated to Ubuntu as my home desktop which it has been ever since. Managed to make Ubuntu my work desktop around 2013, and now that's my niche in a team of 80% Windrones.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 07 2021, @06:34PM (4 children)
Actually, it was quite long ago. Thirty five to forty years. It may still be fresh in your and my memory, but it was long ago. I now keep seeing the fun movies of my youth referred to as "old" movies.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @06:43PM (3 children)
Well, if you roll back from 1990 to 1960 - even computer tech hadn't moved as far as from 1990 to 2020, but any other technology made barely noticeable improvements during those 30 years. Also, much of the improvements in many other fields between 1990 and 2020 can be attributed to the application of "computer power" to their design and development.
As for: long time... if Kurzweil is right and the singularity is near, 30 years won't be a long time for much longer. Alas, even if Kurzweil is right, I see no way for immortality to spread past a few million people, not practically.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 07 2021, @06:54PM (2 children)
The spread of more and more stupidity is likely to prevent this from occurring.
It's a race. How much longer can our technological civilization survive. Suppose China and what's left of the US turn space into a useless wreck. Just one example.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @07:56PM (1 child)
Mankind has always had the power to destroy his own civilization, ever since he created a civilization that could be destroyed.
Sadly, we are now a single globe global civilization, and there's precious little isolation of civilization from any systemic meltdowns.
At least we've got a nice simple policy protecting the first Meg of RAM now, though. That should help a lot ;-)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 07 2021, @08:09PM
Will China abide by that policy?
Russia?
systemd (once it absorbs the kernel) ?
It's the tragically of the commons.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:18PM (4 children)
To me it is on the contrary: Linux 5.13 unbootable on AMD Ryzen system.
This indicates how effective is the current political reality inversion on minds of people and even on minds of engineers.
Perhaps the kernel devs should read more of AMD AGESA documentation and AMD BKDG guide instead of naively relying on ancient intelism.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:35PM (1 child)
Do you have a source for documentation which definitively states how to calculate at runtime how much memory to reserve? AMD and Intel are both notorious for withholding processor documentation for low level functionality. Just ask the coreboot project.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:21PM
It's not a processor problem, the problem is EFI runtime services, out-of-band service processors and trusted platform insecurities. Looking at the processor only, it boots with the interrupt descriptor table at 0x00, other than that no memory is unavailable to the operating system (technically, since all interrupts are masked at bootup, even the memory at 0x00 is usable).
But when you have other services running on a PC that can access main memory without going through the OS, all bets are off. In ancient times this included BIOS and VESA memory stores, DMA transfers before IOMMU, and any other peripheral processing offload. The subversion of the OS continued with Intel's trusted computing platform, the SMM extensions, and the idiocy that is EFI runtime services. And let's not even consider that coprocessor running Minix alongside your OS...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:55PM
In some sense, it is the duty of the smaller player to conform to the larger one, and in this case there's a clear case for Linux 5.13 being much more significant than the AMD Ryzen systems.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by srobert on Monday June 07 2021, @02:34AM
"This indicates how effective is the current political reality inversion on minds of people and even on minds of engineers."
Yes, it affects both people AND engineers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by pvanhoof on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:20PM (17 children)
Soon BIOS developers will need 8GB of RAM to load all of Win10 just to start their .NET WPF XAML UI soft.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:44PM (16 children)
My wife's netbook has 32Gb of SSD space. A year in and Windows 10 is using 25Gb. Fucking disaster of an OS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:47AM (13 children)
How does an OS use up 25 gb? Logfiles?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:07AM (3 children)
Far as I can tell, by mistaking a server's guts for a desktop OS. There's just loads and loads of crap that's maybe useful in a server environment but why on earth is it in a desktop OS? (Nothing specific, but that's the impression I got from trawling through Win10's OMFG disk footprint.)
Then again for many years I had the same complaint about linux: why on earth did every distro load the Apache webserver on a desktop system??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday June 07 2021, @07:31AM (2 children)
> Then again for many years I had the same complaint about linux: why on earth did every distro load the Apache webserver on a desktop system??!
Out of curiosity, which distros did you find this on? I have been installing Linux on desktops for more than 15 years, and I never ended up with the Apache web server auto-installed on one of them. Not even the server distros did it, because they would leave it to you to pick which web server you wanted.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 07 2021, @08:20AM
I'm pretty sure S.u.S.E. Linux (no, that's not written wrong; back then this is how it was named) did this about 20 years ago.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @01:10PM
RedHat6, early Ubuntus (back when they were sending out CDs), several others of the era (at the time getting ANY linux to run was hit-or-miss). Mighta been before your time. But I remember seeing it go by in the load crawl and thinking... that's why its performance sucks. Why is it loading that? what else do I clearly not need but don't know by name?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday June 07 2021, @08:18AM (8 children)
Windows stores basically everything on disk even if you're not using it so that enabling a previously-unused OS feature is more or less instant instead of having to wait on a download. That's why upgrading to a different Windows 10 version is relatively painless, because it's all there already even if you aren't "allowed" to use it yet, so an "upgrade" just flags you as able to use those features and turns them on for you. In Linux terms, it's sort of like if you chose to download all three full Debian DVD images and keep them on your system "just in case". You're not using 90% of those packages but hey you never know if you might want to install something while the internet's out. Except in that case you're choosing to do that, whereas with Windows Microsoft chose it for you.
Plus it likes to use a few gigabytes on a pending "feature update", and after an update there'll be a few gigs used by the previous version for rollback purposes, plus various updates making disk use creep upward over time.
As someone that only deals with Windows in a VM it's kind of annoying because it makes what should be small disk images way larger than they need to be. I just want the Windows equivalent of a Debian netinst image: give me enough OS to boot, let me choose what I want, and only download that as needed. Bleh.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @01:14PM (7 children)
Put like that, it's not entirely insane, but yeah, still a problem in cramped quarters. I suppose you could use nLite to roll your own, or try one of the Tiny Windows that are floating around out there.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:07PM
One more thing is that every time it updates, the copy of the updater is stored. Every time an "app" from windows store updates, that is also stored. The idea is that once the disk is near-full, windows will ask you clean it.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday June 07 2021, @05:06PM (5 children)
Yeah it's not really insane, just a different set of priorities that are tailored toward being convenient for as many people as possible, including ones with very little knowledge. If someone pays that extra fee to go from W10 Home to Pro, they're less likely to get ignorant complaints if the change kicks in more or less instantly and seamlessly so that's what they focus on; your disk space is not their problem.
Sucks for those of us that have different priorities than that, though. You're right that trying to use things like custom images might work, but honestly I don't deal with it enough to bother with the hassle. I hate that it wastes space on my SSD pointlessly, but it's not enough of a problem to get into doing custom stuff to fix. The whole point of that VM is I keep it as vanilla Windows as possible (beyond disabling telemetry and slowing down the forced updates as much as I can) so that it's relatively painless* to deal with; custom install shenanigans are likely to undermine that.
* I dislike using Windows as primary OS because I hate how it does things and always want to customise and tweak it to its absolute limits, which leads to it being a lot more fragile and ends up being a bigger maintenance headache for something I only use occasionally. Rather than choose "stable and shitty or fragile and less shitty" I've found that running it relatively unchanged in a VM works out a lot better because I don't have to use it for as much and it tends to stay working more reliably.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @05:30PM (4 children)
I liked Windows perfectly well through XP/XP64 (still my everyday desktop) but up through that point it was readily beaten into submission and was none the worse for it (mine measure uptimes in years). Didn't use Vista enough to judge but seems to me every tweak made to Win7 causes some sort of misfire on down the line. And there's just no getting Win10 to both behave agreeably and not make my eyes bleed (it's stable enough, but doesn't provide much interface to tweak-to-suit). Most of the problems, as seen from my perspective, seem to be the result of an increasing mismatch between the actual guts (which seem to be fine) and the way the desktop operates. At one time they were thinking about modularizing the desktop, similar to linux's one-distro/many-DEs (I know this cuz discussed with a MSFT engineer at a conference) but unfortunately that never went anywhere.
You know about BlackViper's tweaks? Might be useful for your VMs.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday June 08 2021, @09:51AM (3 children)
Sadly I think there's actually a fair amount of good to be said about some of the Win10 UI changes (along with general internal improvements as you mentioned); I generally prefer its start menu ones prior, for example. I'd been using similar launchers in KDE for years because of general usability and speed benefits, so I was cool with the basic usability and idea there. Plus a bunch of random usability things like better multi-display support (finally) and other things that it should have had years before. Plus it's a lot more tolerant of having alternate OSes installed and is much less likely to obliterate things to "help" you like it used to; it doesn't feel like they're trying to stomp out Linux by forcibly removing it from your system every update like it used to back in the XP/Vista/7 days.
The problem is they tied the good of Win10 up with a lot of annoying and bad things. Telemetry, junk apps, casually reverting your settings, forcing upgrades, live tiles (fuck those things, worst part of an otherwise sane app launcher), etc.
Anyway, my issue has always been that Windows does best when you mostly leave it alone, because that's just not what I want :/ The more tinkering you do the more likely it's going to end up broken and unable to update or boot or something. So I finally gave it what it wants, but inside a VM :)
That would have been nice. They were already pretty close to it back in the 95/98 era and to some extent even XP. It used to be pretty trivial to completely replace explorer.exe with something else to do the same job, and I used to have fun swapping it out with things like LiteStep or even just an IRC client that I rigged to handle the things the system wanted Explorer to do. :)
It's a long shot but at this point what I'd really like to see is MS decide that maintaining its own OS isn't worth it and instead build its own userland on top of the Linux kernel, Android-style, so that you could more seamlessly mix Linux and Windows. Its win32 and win64 stuff already works more or less in that way (just on top of NT) and wine is essentially a win32/win64 implementation on top of *nix (which is why they say "Wine is not an emulator") so there's precedent in the approach itself. I don't think most people really care about the OS itself, they just need access to the platform and its applications, and that could be provided on top of a free OS that they don't have to dump money into.
I know it likely won't happen (or if it does it's a long way off) but I'd pay good money for an official version of something like that.
Hadn't heard of that. Thanks for the mention, I'll have to give it a look.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:54PM (2 children)
I predict that when (not if) consumer Windows becomes entirely a cloud OS, it will become basically such an OS plus desktop. They've been trying to achieve cloud-everything for over 20 years (I first heard the idea broached at the Win2k launch event in Los Angeles. The audience of some 1000 pro IT types all developed identical angry frowns.) When it comes to software, renting is always more lucrative than outright sales.
Unlike yourself, I hate the launcher. It annoys me, it wastes my time, it gives me a burning desire to choke the developer with my bare hands; if I wanted my desktop to behave like a cellphone, I'd use a damned cellphone. I *hate* swiping around to find shit. First thing I always do is switch to cascading menus (with Windows, meaning Classic Shell), and if the desktop won't allow that, it goes on down the road. I've run into distros with KDE unswitchably set to the launcher (what the hell happened to "choice"??) The lack of a normal menu was much of why I don't use Cinnamon; it's just too persistently annoying.
Another thing that annoys me with post-XP Windows are the many changes to Explorer's interface. I live in the file manager; it has to work how I want and can't continually annoy me. Unfortunately none of the 3rd party substitutes for Windows Explorer quite does it for me; they're either unstable (an absolute NO in a file manager) or have their own annoyances. Dolphin has finally got to where it doesn't drive me mad, but that's not useful with Win10.
And then there's how utterly and deliberately UGLY Win10 is. Glaring whitespace competing with near-invisible, one-pixel controls, and no good way to fix that. Win7 could just barely be beaten into a usable look that doesn't hurt my eyes, and 8.1 Enterprise can be sort of (only have this because it came on a laptop and so far it hasn't misbehaved), but Win10 remains eye-burning ugly, and applications built for it often entirely ignore system settings and you're stuck with a glaring white workspace (I'm lookin' at you, Office 2016). It's Brutalism for computers.
If I can't stand looking at it (and I spend a lot of hours with my desktop) it doesn't matter how much better the underpinnings are.
I've had the opposite experience with Win10 respecting other OSs. Firstoff, it bothers me that multiboots now apparently rewrite the boot sector with every restart; this strikes me as disaster-in-waiting. Second, now they insist that whatever booted up is C: and if you don't like your drive letters moving around, tough. (In days of yore, I'd put DOS on C, WinOld on F, and WinCurrent on I. And there they stayed no matter which booted up.) Third... one day I needed an x64 app to briefly run on a box that normally runs XP32. Since my boot drives now live in hotswap bays (in part due to my lost faith in multiboots), easy enough, just swap HDs for one with Win10 installed (cuz it was handy and doesn't mind this abuse, while Win7 will sometimes throw up). So all seemed to be fine until I swapped back, and noticed that ... Win10 had nuked the partition table on the USB-attached HD. Which had been working normally not five minutes before. Best guess is that because the drive is quite old, and was formatted with an old version of NTFS.... Win10 decided it needed updating to current NTFS, and proceeded to attempt it.... entirely in the background and with no notice. Fortunately it's been backed up, but to say I was annoyed is to opine that the ocean is 'damp'. Never again will Win10 touch my systems without everything external being disconnected first. (And this accelerated my "Meh, I can have my customized PCLinuxOS installed in five minutes, why do I care about Win10?")
/rant :D
Type the obvious:
http://www.blackviper.com/ [blackviper.com]
He's been pretty thorough on analyzing services, and has some Handy Scripts available so you don't need to DIY.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Wednesday June 09 2021, @10:56AM (1 child)
From what you've said it sounds like it's because you still want to use it like the start menu and it is (correctly) disappointing at doing that. The reason I'm okay with it is they finally added decent search-and-run type functionality to it, which is my primary interaction aside from setting a few "favourites". Like in KDE for example, the default launcher has good type-to-find and you can set a few oft-used things as favourites, so I primarily interact with the GUI via those or KDE's win+r equivalent (krunner) which is super powerful in comparison to the windows equivalent. Smart search, calculator, translator, currency conerter, and a bunch of other things that are all plugins that you can configure, enable, or disable based on needs. (Basically what MS wanted that Cortana shit to be, but krunner actually works and isn't invasive seeming.) Outside of those three interactions I largely ignore the desktop environment GUI; everything else is either terminal emulators or other applications I care about.
I've been non-Windows for a long time; at first I configured things to act like a start menu because it seemed convenient, but over time I found other ways I liked better, and eventually got along with KDE's fancier launchers. Now admittedly the Windows 10 launcher isn't quite as convenient because, in typical MS fashion, it's not nearly as flexible, but it's close enough. Most-used stuff as tiles to work like the KDE launcher favourites, meta + type to search for anything that isn't already pinned. And credit where it's due, being able to group the tiles is actually one area (maybe the only one) that Windows is better than the KDE equivalent. (But fuck live tiles, those obnoxious fuckers get disabled ASAP and whoever thought they were a good idea should be slapped.)
Not sure what distro and what they did but that isn't even possible. Maybe they locked the panels by default? Or shipped with some wonk ass custom panel thing like Latte Dock that used a weird launcher. KDE panels are completely configurable and you can add/remove whatever the fuck you want with on way to permanently lock them. It's one of the things I like about it.
Can't say much about Cinnamon, I refuse to use it because, while they and MATE were sane enough to fork away from the GNOME 3 abomination, they're still tied to the same toolkit which means they have to march to the GNOME drummer. If GNOME wants something done Gtk does it, even if it fucks over everybody else. The toolkit is poison now because they just don't care about anything outside the GNOME bubble.
I guess you're not (or weren't, at least) using UEFI? I don't know what it does there but prior to going passthrough I had Win10 on a GPT partition with UEFI and it behaved really well in that configuration. Part of that is because that configuration is explicitly made to support multiboot better, with a special small partition intended to hold each OS's bootloder and let you select it at startup. Totally bypasses the need for the kind of kludges that used to be necessary, which means Windows behaves a lot better because MS always sucked at respecting the boot sector. I used to have to always keep Linux on a separate disk and physically disconnect it to avoid problems, but with UEFI+GPT I had the two coexisting for a few years and many updates with no issue, even on the same physical disk.
Can't say much about the drive issues, my experience with it was entirely with fairly persistent drive configuration used for dual boot to another non-Windows OS. I wouldn't be surprised that it does stupid things with other Windows OSes and drives to be "helpful" though, a lot of stupid things the OS does comes from "let us help you, you're just a stupid user" logic.
I try to just keep it short and sweet: "Windows will not touch bare metal hardware". Though I'm going to have to relax that soon on a laptop for work purposes. Planning on setting up a partition specifically for that, making it as small as absolutely possible for needs, and then using the rest of the space for personal use. I don't trust BYOD policy and the insane software used with an OS that's not intentionally sanitised to be as empty as possible :P
I glanced at it already, though only briefly. I did notice it said the Win10 stuff was listed as unmaintained as of a few years ago, though.
also lol, SN mangled the bare URL portion of that quote when inside quote tags, at least in the preview. I'm going to leave that because it's funny.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 09 2021, @05:39PM
Yeah, I gotta have my start menu, or I'm not happy. There's been search since ?Win7? and it includes everything on the path, but in Windows I never use it. I have a quicklaunch item for the start menu, and am accustomed to having my way with the contents, so it's all sorted exactly as I wish. Of course, with Windows I'm starting with buck-naked and install everything myself, exactly where I want it. (Except for the crap I've been dragging from one system to the next for 25 years without troubling to reinstall it. Did you know that some versions of MSOffice will put up with this abuse?)
In KDE, tho... its logic for which submenu something belongs in, and whether it'll be displayed at all, is occasionally a bit lacking, and there I do sometimes have to resort to search, usually for whatever I've just installed and now can't find. I suppose I could use the menu editor but I never get around to it, partly because my preferred install already comes with the kitchen sink, and I'm leery of disturbing it. Linux DEs have some peculiar fragilities, often cosmetic but when they blow you can't get back where you started. Well, at least now there's Timeshift.
My only box that currently has a multiboot, and then only because it was intended as experimental and just stuck that way (with Win10, Win10Lite, and Server 2008R2, and an old Hackintosh on the other HD... there's nothing so permanent as a temporary camp!) without bothering to look, I think it only knows UEFI. Can't just pick the desired boot; have to pick it, then watch it reboot again into whichever I picked ... which was how I figured it's rewriting stuff, not just pick-an-OS and off we go, like in the Olden Days of multiple Windows on the same HD.
I stopped doing mutilboot across species lines a long long time ago, after observing numerous and consistent howls of pain in a forum devoted to such things: Windows usually kept to itself, but GRUB liked to nuke Windows. Way back when but the lesson stuck. In any case I generally prefer metal to VM, which is why there are 9 PCs in sight (6 being frankenputers), hotswap bays in every box, a stack of laptop HDs, and a bunch more PCs in the Closet. This is where old computers go to die. :D
I've run into set-in-stone KDE a bunch of times; didn't bother to keep track of which ones, but it's proved a fair marker for "everything else set up exactly how I don't want it". Sometimes stuck with the launcher and the option to switch nowhere to be found,.. and then most recently a rolling KDE-bleeding-edge distro that sounded interesting, but had the panel at the right edge of the screen (which caused numerous annoyances), and Unlock just flat did not work.
Gnome... ugh (there's the ultimate in "you're just a stupid user, do as you're told"). Everything I dislike about Android and MacOS, all in one handy interface; it makes Win10 seem pleasant by comparison. Observed a long time ago that KDE had better user-logic, and Qt apps generally were better-mannered than Gtk apps. And I'm past where I'm willing to spend assloads of effort fixing and tweaking; at this point shit had better work pretty much as I wish out of the box, or it goes on down the road and I try another. I tested around 150 distros and variants before I found one I can live with for everyday, and we still have arguments about the local network.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of being at the mercy of your upstream and whatever weird ideas may come down the pike; dunno how dependent Cinnamon is on Gnome but it kinda disturbs me that Mint is dependent on the whims of Ubuntu. If I liked it enough to want to use it, I might have to stick with LMDE instead. -- Then again, my preferred distro is a one-man-band, and what happens when he hangs it up?
[shaking head at weird paste bug] That's just strange :D Yeah, BlackViper's Windows stuff is sort of retired, but still useful enough. Oh, speaking of funnies... he and I both lived in SoCal, both moved out to the desert about the same time (lived about 10 miles apart as the crow flies) and both departed the Granola State about the same time. Great minds? :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:04PM
don't be cheap - buy her a mac book air
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @09:30PM
disc cleanup
run as administrator
'check windows update cleanup
goto the second tab 'more options' click system restore and shadow copies cleanup ...
go back to the first tab
That should get you a decent amount of space back.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:33PM (34 children)
In my youthful computer geek days I used to subscribe to some programming magazines and I remember looking on in envy when all the 32-bit Unix workstation started to come out. In those days, you typically had a 32-bit CPU, 4MB of RAM and a 120MB hard disk. Often the CPU was a Motorola 68020 or 030 or, if you were very lucky, a SPARC or MIPS. There were even some ARM Unix workstations. 4MB seemed to be about the minimum for running Unix. 1MB is 25% of that, and the Linux kernel harks back to those days. In 1991, when Linux was first devised, a 386 or 486 with 4MB of RAM was quite a powerful PC, and the minimum you needed to run a proper OS.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:43PM (3 children)
And the memory went on a full sized daughter card where you plugged in a seemingly endless array of DIP chips out of a tube, then set DIP switches to specify the size of the chips. Then check for memory errors, pull the card and mash each chip with your thumb to seat it better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:10AM (2 children)
LOL, yes, my 286 has one of those cards.... 2mb was at the time a massive upgrade, except DOS couldn't see it as system RAM (something was wrong with the card's driver). But it could see it as a RAMdisk. So I converted it into workspace, and had an astonishingly fast 286.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 07 2021, @12:23PM (1 child)
That was the other crazy part. Until the 386 and 32 bit OSes, 1 MB was the limit for the old segmented memory without dirty tricks and poor performance, so the extra memory was bank switched into a 64K chunk of "high memory".
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @01:19PM
This one was supposed to work as EMS, and did work on a different 286 and DOS5 (I ran DOS6). But not on mine, I already had RAM cram-packed with all my TSRs and everything worked out to the last byte, so not having it as usable RAM wasn't so bad. Having the high-speed workspace was more valuable, so I lost interest in pursuing it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:18PM (3 children)
Yep, in fact I think back in late 80s early 90s some Unix boxes were only 2MB RAM, reason I think that is we had a disk quota larger than RAM size and I'm absolutely sure disk quota was 4MB :-)
When I decided to get my own hardware (for Linux) I pushed the boat out and specified 16MB RAM, I can remember getting a "what do you need that much for" comment from a guy in the next lab - I think he was a vi user, I wasn't, I knew what I needed it for :-)
Back to topic though - you are correct and what is being referred to as "wankery" now had good reason for existing back then. You very probably needed every possibly available byte of that first 1MB, and having it reserved away at boot might well make the difference between a system that was usable or constantly in swap hell.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:31PM (1 child)
eight megabytes and constantly swapping?
(Score: 4, Touché) by choose another one on Monday June 07 2021, @08:26AM
Guilty as charged. Probably spent more time programming my editor than editing my programs....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Acabatag on Monday June 07 2021, @04:10AM
I still have a running specimen of an ancient Altos box. Called an 'Altos 586' because it was a five-user (serial consoles) 8086-based Unix box running Microsoft Xenix. It supports five users in 512K of RAM with an 8086.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:44PM (3 children)
There was also a period where RAM was just plain *expensive*. The "correct" option to get the best performance out of your computer was to add as much RAM as possible, but that was infeasible due to the expense. So there were articles on getting a motherboard with a faster bus, faster-spinning hard drives, faster/multicore CPUs etc. to improve performance.
However, since RAM prices became a tenth or less what they used to be *and* Linux/Windows 7+ aggressively/opportunistically caches disk access in RAM, only a few motherboards can accommodate much more RAM and the shipped standard is something like 8GB (more like 16GB these days), when 24GB+ drastically improves (non-network) multiple-application responsiveness. People still ask me questions about DDR3 (?)vs DDR4 RAM, or whether they should get faster RAM, when based on my understanding the RAM speed is less important than having a lot of it to hold your whole application and much of your data memory-resident.
I guess most of these machines are spec'd for web browsing and gaming, but power users who might switch between a few apps for work -- e.g., Outlook, IDE, MS Teams, 20-tab-open browser running multiple heavyweight web apps, maybe a few MS-office type documents -- could probably benefit from maxing out RAM nowadays for maybe $300-$500. The speed and durability of solid-state drives make this somewhat less of an issue, but I found it odd that RAM used to be a big deal, and now that operating systems and power-user demands could benefit from that headroom, what seems to have been a holy grail/pipe-dream in the past seems to have dropped out of consideration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:33PM
RAM speed matters, the performance difference between generations here is significant. I'm also not sure many users could figure out how to use 8GB of RAM, let alone 16+, because the browser is the heaviest application in common use, and even chrome is fine with 4.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 07 2021, @12:51AM
That is also my experience. If all of your programs fit in memory, and stay there, even ancient PC-100 memory would be "fast enough". It's the constant swapping that wears away that last nerve.
As you note, SSD's have changed that to some extent. Still, a shortage of RAM is going to decrease the life of your SSD. Better to read the SSD once, commit to memory, then write back to the SSD when appropriate, than to read continuously from SSD.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:18AM
That's my experience too. 8GB is adequate, but same box with 32GB is night and day, and that's even when it's not being particularly exercised -- everything is just a whole lot snappier. And was the same with several different OSs. (Glad I got greedy and ran around filling up all my RAM capacity before the prices went stupid...)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:45PM (7 children)
Pfft when I were a lad, we had 64k and we ENJOYED it. Luxury.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:26PM (3 children)
My first computer had 1k of RAM and storage was to cassette tape at 300 baud.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:35PM (2 children)
You kids had it easy.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:01AM (1 child)
Yeah, we had punch card operated looms, and our parents called us lazy asses (they used manual looms).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday June 07 2021, @08:46AM
I'm surprised they didn't call you Jacq arses ;)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday June 07 2021, @03:17AM (2 children)
Of course, we had it tough: We had to get up at 2 o'clock every morning, half-an-hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of gray goo from a blown-out capacitor, calculate 400 instructions perfectly on bits of scrap paper, solder 15 chips in place, and when we got home our computers would kill us and dance around on our graves singing Daisy, Daisy.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Eratosthenes on Monday June 07 2021, @05:45AM (1 child)
Was thinking of composing a "Yorkshiremen" dialogue, but now I just stand in awe of Thexalon. Daisy! In Space, no one can hear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:26AM
Will I dream?
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:46PM (8 children)
It was also the Unix/Linux folks who kept complaining that a GUI would waste "too much memory", even though the original Mac did it in 128k, and Windows 95 could do it in as little as 4MB.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:31PM (5 children)
I remember when the Linux people were complaining that X was "slow" and used too many resources. A friend of mine asked one of the original X developer about it, and he said that X was designed to run on 1 MIPS machines. People were worried that because it was a network protocol that somehow it would be very slow. It isn't, and particularly not when you're running it on the local machine.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @06:24AM (4 children)
Notice the sudden shift in tenses during your post...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:27PM (3 children)
No kidding. X's fundamental design is wrong in the one should build a graphics system with fast local performance and built a network layer (IF this is even to be done!) on top of that. Experience has long shown that drawing primitives sent across the network are a failed idea. Way too low-level way to implement GUIs across a network.
The Smalltalk-72 programming language made the same mistake and implemented message passing in a network transparent manner. Method calls were terribly slow, and later versions of Smalltalk were implemented using virtual methods for message passing, same as in Java or C++. Objective-C, which is an amalgamation of Smalltalk and C, implemented the original Smalltalk-72 message passing technique of network transparent method calls. As a result, it is slow. Objective-C has been in the process of being phased out for a long time by Apple in favor of other languages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:56PM (1 child)
If the client and server are the same machine, that is if you are running the application locally, the data isn't sent across the network. I love the flexibility that X gives for running GUI apps on a LAN. It means I can have one monitor and one keyboard and several machines without a KVM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:52PM
Modern X doesn't send drawing primitives across the network. The X extension used updates the remote framebuffer. MIT guessed wrong when they came up with the design of X.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:23PM
Correction: I need to correct my programming language post: the programming languages I mentioned did not, I believe implement NETWORK TRANSPARENT message processing, but they did do dynamic message lookup based on an intermediate method lookup broker. This is one step below network transparency, but is similar in some ways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:29AM (1 child)
128K was not enough. A mere year later, Apple released the "Fat Mac" with 512K of RAM.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mechanicjay on Monday June 07 2021, @06:43PM
Yep, though the OG 128K release model didn't even make it a full year.
Sept '84: 512k machines released.
I have an actual FEb '84 128k mac -- it is possibly the most useless computer I've ever used. It's fine for like a demo of a sneak peak of what the platform might be capable of, but not really usable. Adding an external floppy drive helps quite a bit, which lets you keep the internal disk as the "system disk" so you don't have keep swapping it back it at random times. It's neat as an artifact, but I have far old and more capable machines that I use on a regular basis.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:09PM (4 children)
To think that my cheap wireless router has more of both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:39AM (3 children)
One day the cheap wireless router will have 256Gb and 1million cores. Think about that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday June 07 2021, @05:07AM (2 children)
I doubt it. With the size of transistors approaching the size of atoms, Moore's law is coming to an end.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday June 07 2021, @08:48AM (1 child)
Meh, atoms are mostly empty space - surely we can cram in higher densities there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:57PM
Neutron star memory?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:42PM (5 children)
The common pattern that repeats time and again in various projects in recent years; features that were working before, are getting removed because the new crop of "developers" cannot handle the complexity. The very same complexity that the previous generations thought nothing about.
The stink you smell in the air, is the frameworks of our civilization rotting all around us. The precious "win against ableism" was cutting the throat to spite the trachea.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by engblom on Monday June 07 2021, @07:29AM (1 child)
Previous generations were never able to handle the complexity. Even today we still find bugs that has been lurking for decades. They were just forced to add the complexity because they had no other choice with the limited resources the computers had, not because they had the skills.
In the past when security was not the same important, but performance was everything (because computer resources where limited), it was motivated to add the complexity (and bugs). Today with everything connected to Internet, and with personal information and access to services as banking, medical records etc, it would be insane to add complexity just to save a fraction of computer resources.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @08:32AM
Suuure we do. One per HOW many thousands of more severe bugs added by the present crop of devs?
A hundred pieces of journalistic screamers celebrating each such a fortunate find, do NOT change the sick reality where Linux releases are blocked time and again by the bugs being added in the recent patches. Some do even get their own bit of celebration too.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/07/linux_5_12_rc2_emergency_swapfile_bug_fix/ [theregister.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:43AM (2 children)
Simplicity is to be preferred over complexity wherever possible. It makes systems more robust and maintainable.
Complexity is something that should be avoided. A 'machismo' about or fetish towards complexity for its own sake is a bad attitude to have about software development.
Sometimes problems can be irreducibly complex, for fundamental reasons, or due to requirements or restraints. But when the opportunity arises -- as it has here -- to simplify the system, then the wiser decision in the long run is to take the opportunity and make the system better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:51PM (1 child)
Every second "the opportunity arises" to reduce the feature set, or waste resources. Those are the opportunities you should NOT grab.
A program which uses up all resources doing nothing, is simplicity itself, isn't it? The race to that Holy Grail is very much on. Play the stupid game, win the stupid prizes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:04PM
The race was won before you were born, zoomer.
int main(void)
{
while(69) fork();
return(420);
}
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday June 07 2021, @11:03AM (2 children)
Is that memory still mapped in /dev/mem? If so, it sounds like you could store arbitrary data there without the kernel or any process ever touching it (unless that process also accesses /dev/mem directly). Probably not useful, but an interesting thought anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @07:50AM (1 child)
That depends on whether CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM is enabled or not. If it is, then it would not be accessible that way. Even if it was disabled, storing arbitrary data there is not a good idea. The data there is routinely read and overwritten and it can be very difficult to tell in advance what part of that area is safe on which hardware. Hence why they are just reserving the whole block instead of trying to keep some sort of table halfway accurate based solely on the bug reports they receive. It is widely believed that Microsoft doesn't even try and a number of other operating systems don't either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @09:49PM
Look at what landed in my inbox: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YL%2FTc1bGkgXKRKfT@zn.tnic/ [kernel.org]
(Score: 1) by jman on Monday June 07 2021, @12:20PM
Real operating systems only need 640K.