With Facebook currently in the news again, it's perhaps worth pointing out that I left the platform 11 years ago because they were already generating fake replies to fake posts, presumably in an attempt to increase engagement with ads. I got rid of my account and blocked facebook URLs and IP addresses on my router so that I cannot accidentally engage with any of their stuff at all.

That is of course not the only thing which was bad about Facebook. By 2016 they were working to undermine democracy.

So there's nothing actually knew about the harm they're causing now. It's been obvious for more than a decade which direction they were heading in. But I'm happy that there's more awareness now.

So, have you all deleted your facebook / instagram and whatsapp accounts already ? If not, why not ? Meta, just like Twitter, has been a nazi bar for some time now.

https://davidhembrow.blogspot.com/search/label/facebook/

The tech thing outside of crypto bro bullshit that got me interested in Polkadot is some "math inventions" in the distributed computing.

If you distribute block generation let's say by N in a blockchain you easily end up to an architecture where also network security also divides by N.

What Polkadot and its spec generalization JAM (https://graypaper.com/) do differently is that with the help of game theory parallel chains balance back in collaboration.

The basis of all this is described in this math paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/961

With these shenanigans, the network sort of creates a scheme where you have a distributed computer where the relay chain is actually just part of the overall machinery tracking the history.

What I personally work on is a RISC-V relative bytecode VM called PVM, which has eight registers instead of 16 and immediate ECALL. This speeds up JIT over let's say WASM or eBPF given that register allocation to ARM and x86 becomes much more straight-forward process and generally it is more close proximity of those CPU architectures. I.e. what I hack is essentially a software-defined compute core and overall this network forms a sort of like "GPGPU" infrastructure.

The value part is more to optimized to book keeping than increase investor value so that you can make shared services where everyone gets their part when being a sub-provider of some service. E.g. there's no fixed number of tokens but there's instead rate-limited inflation.

So yeah, I'm not interested in blockchains or cryptocurrency per se but I'm very interested on distributed systems and providing alternatives to a data center. I think this make this work valuable.

@kernellogger Related to testing V4L2 loopback driver. It kind of grew out of BuildRoot (testing side, hard to get some packages etc.) and Yocto feels way too big hammer. Fedora Server in libvirt feels like the right scale for this work...

@kernellogger thanks, that page looks useful!

In kernel-ark:

1. "make dist-fedora-configs": Can I make only process x86 stuff and not all the archiectures?
2. Let's say I've applied patches containing a new kconfig flag. How to fix that up?

#fedora #linux #kernel

I feel that Rust has grown up. People use it like a pro for their business 😎 No extra fuss...

#rustlang

@kornel Yeah so I ASSUMED that it must be along the lines what was described here but I don't want to live in a belief system so had to ask (and I'm glad that I got so many great answers here).

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-reaches-key-milestone-push-functional-safety-certification-red-hat-vehicle-operating-system Woot! 😃

@ncopa Yeah, I know, I test my own kernel tree on it. Otherwise, I test on QEMU but if I want to give a shot with real HW, this is my pick.

With SBC's you gotta know the gems ;-) For ARM the overally best choice is obviously Raspberry Pi 3B+. What makes this board special is broken TrustZone so you can deploy fTPM on it.

@ncopa It's really my recommended board for testing RISC-V kernel. And the reason for this is that it is aging ;-) Also BuildRoot upstream boots it nicely.

@mre Thanks this cleared it up for me!

The very first thing with this board is set the dip switches to SDIO mode ;-) Figure 4-10 in https://doc-en.rvspace.org/VisionFive2/PDF/VisionFive2_QSG.pdf

A Rust question. Command::env_clear() has this example:

use std::process::Command;

Command::new("ls")
.env_clear()
.spawn()
.expect("ls command failed to start");

Isn't that like "do nothing" given that the instance Command was just created? I don't understand this example.

#rust #rustlang

New year, new role @Mastodon!

Our core team is looking for a senior Front-end Developer to elevate the web UI/UX experience for our users.

Ideally:

1. You are highly skilled in accessible and semantic #HTML
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3. Experienced with #Javascript, #Typescript and complex React/Redux applications

This remote full-time position requires a 4-hour overlap with the CET timezone.

For more info/to apply:
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#FediHire #GetFediHired #hiring #frontend

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/ai_spending_spree_continues_as/

@kernellogger OK. It is useful for audio stuff like https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge. Thus interested...

The API change itself: takes me about 20 - 40 minutes but it just has quite a few routes for failure ;-)

I wonder if a kselftest written with Python can depend on GStreamer? I.e. check and skip on failure.

I'm almost done converting the demo shown in my screencast from bash and fmpeg to python and gstreamer [1]. There has been bunch of blockers, like for example getting Python bindings compile in my BuildRoot environment (stable version bump helped).

One final peace that I was missing was how to pass a file descriptor to GStreamer pipeline but here it is:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/coreelements/fdsrc.html

So... 1.5 weeks of scratching my head but this all work was absolutely required before making the breaking API change to the driver code (i.e. return file descriptor to an anoymous inode in the ioctl instead of writing to /dev/video0).

Now I need only a small tweak to the test program when I test that kernel change. FINALLY ready to go back to the fun i.e. kernel hacking ;-)

[1] https://social.kernel.org/notice/ApXBpAVuAyGBmcPye8

#linux #kernel #gstreamer #python #buildroot

https://thenewstack.io/c-committee-divided-on-memory-safety-plans/

When building with BuildRoot specifically (forgot this detail).