today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 28, 2024

• Kernel Space

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Storage costs are plummeting

    Storage costs are plummeting like a skydiver in freefall—between 10 and 100 times cheaper with each passing decade. Meanwhile, the programmer population is growing at a leisurely pace, like a tortoise in a marathon, increasing by about 50% per decade. And the Linux kernel? It is maybe doubling in size every ten years. The net result: we are using storage of data (videos, images, model weights) while code is taking a backseat, fading into the background.

• BSD

  • Undeadly ☛ UDP parallel input committed to -current

    The socket layer of UDP has been made fully MP safe. UDP output is MP safe for a while. mvs@ has fixed the missing pieces in socket splicing recently. This means that complete UDP stack can be processed by multiple threads now. Activate multi processing for udp_input() when called with IPv4 or IPv6 packets.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Infrastructure musings for the 3rd week of july 2024

    The week started with the f41 mass rebuild finishing up (it actually mostly finished over the weekend, with just a few straggling builds left). For those that don’t know much about it, it’s basically when we (mostly) rebuild every package in Fedora rawhide. This then picks up a number of fixes (like improved compilers/tooling) and also is a chance to confirm that packages actually build currently and aren’t sitting there broken waiting for someone to need to quickly update them and find they cannot. Things were a bit slower this time because we have fewer (but larger/faster) s390x builders, so when say 8 ghc versions are all building at once, smaller things pile up behind them, but it all worked out fine in the end. We again hit a problem that happens it seems like every time now: Someone commits some change to a package to git and then either doesn’t build it, or does, but it fails gating or is otherwise untagged as broken, then the mass rebuild comes along and builds it again. We have talked about some ideas to handle this better, hopefully we will get to implementing something.

    Upon looking around, I found that the linux support for the new snapdragon X laptops has been moving very quickly over the last few weeks. Lots of things now work, but of course it’s super early days and you really need to be willing to poke and prod to get things working. Which describes me pretty well, so I ordered a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x to play around with things. Look forward to some reviews and info about what can be made working in the short term in Fedora. Should be a lot of fun.

  • What happened to the CentOS Forums

    If you try to go to the CentOS Forums, you will instead be directed to the status page. The CentOS Forums is sadly one of the resources that went away the the end of CentOS Linux 7. The system was a classic PHP web-forum which had been run for over a decade by volunteers as a resource for the CentOS Community. Due to its age, and its usefulness, there have been several requests to get it back up and working. However, it looks highly unlikely for several reasons: [...]

• Applications

  • CubicleNate ☛ Qoppa PDF Studio 2024 on Linux

    The user has been a dedicated user of PDF Studio since 2008. The application's standout features include non-subscription model, GNU/Linux compatibility, and useful tools for PDF management. The user appreciates its dark mode, multi-page PDF splitting/merging, scanning and cropping, OCR, digital signatures, and MS Office files conversion. PDF Studio's installation and upgrade process is hassle-free, and the user values Qoppa's support for Linux.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Thorsten Ball ☛ Database Indexes & Phone Books

      When I was a junior programmer I was sitting next to an experienced senior programmer that not only loved our PostgreSQL database but also knew SQL very well and a lot about databases in general.

      Often, when I’d loudly ask the room why such is such or why something works the way it did, he would perk up, his spine seemingly realising that it’s lesson time, slide over with his chair, and start a first-principles explanation.

      One day I was wondering what an index-only scan is.

      Database indexes are like phone books, he said. You know how in a phone book you have the first name, last name, name of the street, number of the house, and phone number for each person living in a city?