Development quotes of the weeks

[Posted November 29, 2017 by ris]

There's an old net story from the 80's, which I can't find right now, but is about two computers, 10 feet apart, having a ridiculously long network route between them, packets traveling into other states or countries and back, when they could have flowed over a short cable.

Ever since I read that, I've been collecting my own ridiculously long routes. ssh bouncing from country to country, making letters I type travel all the way around the world until they echo back on my screen. Tasting the latency that's one of the only ways we can viscerally understand just how big a tangle of wires humanity has built.

Yesterday, I surpassed all that, and I did it in a way that hearkens right back to the original story. I had two computers, 20 feet apart, I wanted one to talk to the other, and the route between the two ended up traveling not around the Earth, but almost the distance to the Moon.

[...]

And finally, after 178000 and change miles of data transfer, the letter I'd typed a full second ago appeared on my screen.

Not bad for a lazy solution to a problem that could have been solved by walking across the room, eh?

— Joey Hess

DOS is simple, which is why it remains so common for BIOS flashing, testing, etc. Replacing that with the horrendous bloat of UEFI Shell or Python!?!? Yuck!!

tl;dr: You can pry 7c00h and INT xx from my cold, dead hands.

— userbinator (Thanks to Paul Wise)

According to recent press, "Kodi boxes" can KILL.

Okay, to be specific (and perhaps a touch less alarmist), the power supplies on cheap, untested devices are often a bit on the dreadful side, and that's where a risk of things bursting into flames resides. Beyond that, we assure you that the Kodi software remains friendly, docile, free-range, and free of any killer instinct.

— Prof Yaffle

Development quotes of the weeks

Posted Nov 30, 2017 14:06 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

userbinator can keep his DOS. The boxes I've bought with UEFI boot on them are the only x86 boxes I have ever been able to upgrade kernels on without risking losing any of the previous ones unless I ask for them (thanks to the EFI stub, and EFI shells that --- unlike every bootloader I have ever seen -- are happy to let you have literally dozens of old kernels and their initramfses hanging around indefinitely); they are the only x86 boxes I have ever been able to upgrade the firmware on without massive risk and without some stupid crusty old DOS floppy.

My last machine but two, the last one with only a conventional BIOS, required a DOS floppy to upgrade the BIOS even though the machine had no floppy drive: if I attached one (and no a USB floppy would not do), I found that FreeDOS was unwilling to boot because the machine had too much disk space or too much RAM (I was never clear which it was and I could hardly test either case, so the BIOS and BMC stayed un-upgraded for the lifetime of that machine). The disk controller needed special hacks to split the disk into "volumes" each appearing as a smaller drive so that one appeared to be small enough that the BIOS would boot off it because disks bigger than 2TiB are unimaginable and unrepresentable. And if anything went wrong you were in a world of pain spelled 'LI'-and-a-hang, with netbooting or CD booting almost your only hope (USB booting barely worked). On my EFI box I get a shell even if nothing on the disk works at all, even if all the disks are dead (not even the GRUB shell can do that). Oh yeah and also unlike every BIOS I have ever used, I can just rsync or disk-image the EFI system partition to all the disks in the machine and add them to the boot list, so if I lose a disk it'll seamlessly pick up the kernel from another one. RAID arrays on BIOS machines have always been vulnerable to the "oops what happens if your boot disk dies, is the MBR on the other disks up to date?" problem. This too goes away with UEFI.

You will take my UEFI from my cold dead hands. The sooner BIOSes die and are replaced with one group of embedded-class systems that has basically nothing and uses u-boot and one group that has a full UEFI installation, the happier I'll be.