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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:51PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:47AM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:47AM (#1142558)

    How does an OS use up 25 gb? Logfiles?

  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:07AM (3 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Monday June 07 2021, @03:07AM (#1142611) Homepage

    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)

      by Unixnut (5779) on Monday June 07 2021, @07:31AM (#1142671)

      > 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

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday June 07 2021, @08:20AM (#1142682) Journal

        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

        by Reziac (2489) on Monday June 07 2021, @01:10PM (#1142721) Homepage

        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)

    by Marand (1081) on Monday June 07 2021, @08:18AM (#1142681) Journal

    How does an OS use up 25 gb? Logfiles?

    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)

      by Reziac (2489) on Monday June 07 2021, @01:14PM (#1142722) Homepage

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:07PM (#1142734)

        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)

        by Marand (1081) on Monday June 07 2021, @05:06PM (#1142808) Journal

        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)

          by Reziac (2489) on Monday June 07 2021, @05:30PM (#1142814) Homepage

          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)

            by Marand (1081) on Tuesday June 08 2021, @09:51AM (#1143078) Journal

            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 :)

            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.

            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.

            You know about BlackViper's tweaks? Might be useful for your VMs.

            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)

              by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:54PM (#1143198) Homepage

              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)

                by Marand (1081) on Wednesday June 09 2021, @10:56AM (#1143481) Journal

                Unlike yourself, I hate the launcher.

                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.)

                I've run into distros with KDE unswitchably set to the launcher (what the hell happened to "choice"??)

                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.

                Firstoff, it bothers me that multiboots now apparently rewrite the boot sector with every restart; this strikes me as disaster-in-waiting.

                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.

                Never again will Win10 touch my systems without everything external being disconnected first.

                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

                Type the obvious:
                " rel="url2html-8123">http://www.blackviper.com/

                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

                  by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday June 09 2021, @05:39PM (#1143604) Homepage

                  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.