today's howtos
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University of Toronto ☛ What ZIL metrics are exposed by (Open)ZFS on Linux
The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) is effectively ZFS's version of a filesystem journal, writing out hopefully brief records of filesystem activity to make them durable on disk before their full version is committed to the ZFS pool. What the ZIL is doing and how it's performing can be important for the latency (and thus responsiveness) of various operations on a ZFS filesystem, since operations like fsync() on an important file must wait for the ZIL to write out (commit) their information before they can return from the kernel. On Linux, OpenZFS exposes global information about the ZIL in /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/zil, but this information can be hard to interpret without some knowledge of ZIL internals.
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Benji Encalada Mora ☛ Fun with Image Maps and SVGs
I wanted to write all this out because even though I feel like I've seen this before, I had a hard time searching for it and finding examples or tutorials. This may not be the best approach to get this effect but its what I came up with. If you've seen something like this implemented anywhere, let me know as I'd love to see it and try to collect them here so that myself and whoever else stumbles upon this can use it as reference and inspiration in the future.
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University of Toronto ☛ NetworkManager won't share network interfaces, which is a problem
Today I upgraded my home desktop to Fedora 39. It didn't entirely go well; specifically, my DSL connection broke because Fedora stopped packaging some scripts with rp-pppoe and Fedora's old ifup, which is used by my very old-fashioned setup still requires those scripts. After I got back on the Internet, I decided to try an idea I'd toyed with, namely using NetworkManager to handle (only) my DSL link. Unfortunately this did not go well: [...]
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Android Authority ☛ What is x86-64-v3? Understanding the x86-64 microarchitecture levels
The term x86-64v3 is once again a discussion point for Linux users, sparking curiosity and questions about its relevance to the platform. But what is it, why does it matter to Linux, and what is all the fuss about? Find out everything you need to know about x86-64v3 below.
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The buzz is primarily due to Red Hat Linux Enterprise Linux 10 moving to the v3 baseline. Gentoo is now offering v3 packages, and there are experimental builds of Ubuntu Server using v3. This essentially means that when they compile it, they use the right compiler flags to ensure that AVX2 can be used when necessary but this requires hardware support. Different Linux distributions will roll this support out at different stages. For instance, NixOS is transitioning to v2 in 2024 and subsequently to v3 by 2027.
Comparisons of Linux distros compiled with baseline or v2 to those with v3 show varying performance results. In some cases, there is a performance boost, while in others, there is a performance decline. This is a maturing technology regarding the compiler flags and the code the compiler produces for different use cases.
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Medium ☛ Setting Up VS Code Insiders On Linux [Ed: This is proprietary spyware controlled by Microsoft; no good reason to legitimise this for GNU/Linux users]
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Medium ☛ Setting Up Bluetooth on Aegix Linux — Or Any Artix Base-with-Runit Distro
If you are running a systemd-free distribution with an Artix base and Runit init system and believed the aforementioned rumor about Bluetooth at any point, then this article is for you.