today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 21, 2023

• I Managed to Make Fallout 4 Work in openSUSE Leap.

  So, openSUSE Leap 15.5 being an enterprise-like system with slow moving releases, it’s been something of a chore to set up for a laptop, especially one where I occasionally want to play Windows games.

  Even after installing the vulkan packages and Wine Stable 8.0, and the media codecs from the “Packman” repository with “opi”, when I launched Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition this time, I ended up with no voices and no soundtracks.

  When I ran it with wine Fallout4.exe, it complained that it could not find a Windows Media Audio codec for gstreamer.

• kernel: pid 4900 (conftest), jid 968, uid 65534: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)

  I see see these log messages on a regular basis. There is no distinct pattern. Some nights there might be 1, others 2. Today there were three: r730-01 is my main server in the basement.

• Bacula – calculating Maximum Volume Bytes and Maximum Volumes based on historical data

  I’ve used Bacula since at least January 2004 (so nearly 20 years). I liked it so much I dropped my deployment-in-motion of another tool (if you search lightly, you can find out which one). I liked it so much, I wrote a PostgreSQL backend for it. This post is not for Bacula novices.

• Are we transparent enough?

  For me this was surprising, so I would like to raise a few questions here that might as well be answered with: "sure, we are", and I just did not see it because I am a bit out of touch with KDE development news (and modern ways of communication in general). Personal and biased opinion follows. But here are the questions first:

  Are we handling such a prominently user-facing (as in in your face) changes transparently enough?

  How do we decide for such (as in groundbreaking) new defaults?

  Have the users (as in many of them) been asked?

  So, now for the personal opinion...
  

• Monitor, Control and Debug Docker Containers with WhaleDeck

  When you want to work with your Docker containers...

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Yep

  Finally a default value for gl_PointSize.

  Long-term fans of the blog will recall that I’ve previously raged against the insane concept that pointsize must be written many times prior. In fact, it remains the second most blogged about topic in SGC history right behind Big Triangledescriptor management, the topic that modern graphics-related blogs must cover above all others.

  Finally with maintenance5 we can be freed from these unjust shackles that have bound us for so long. No more* shall complex logic be unnecessarily injected into the compiler stack to add senseless writes to this output.
  * except all that code still has to exist and run to handle drivers that don’t support maintenance5

  Beyond the obvious benefit of having a fixed default pointsize (sanity), let’s check out some other benefits.

  Shader Reduction

  Previously all zink-emitted shaders would have a pointsize write, even those that were never used for drawing points. This resulted in unnecessary shader i/o at the hardware level. Nobody wants unnecessary shader i/o at the hardware level.

  Now, however, it’s possible to use heuristics during linking to delete all unnecessary pointsize writes any time there is no XFB emission.

  How much performance improvement will this yield?