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Previous 90 comments.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 21:26 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by rweikusat2
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Samba exists, but it does case insensitivity in a very expensive way. There are other use-cases as well, like mounting FAT filesystems.

I've seen this firsthand - I'm using a Linux server for TimeMachine backups for Mac OS X. TimeMachine is braindead - it creates hundreds of thousands files in the same directory. With the default settings Samba slowed down to a crawl.

Fortunately, TimeMachine doesn't care about file name cases. So by following steps from here: https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Performance_Tuning I was able to speed up backups by something like 10x. This is not insignificant and it would be nice for Linux to handle similar use-cases natively.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 21:19 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by rweikusat2
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

As I understand, the kernel will keep track of canonicalized names in file cache, so it won't have to do a search.

There's also the problem of making sure that no duplicate files exist.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 21:17 UTC (Wed) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by Cyberax
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

There is no such thing as "a fileserver use case". Samba exists and has existed (and been used) for a while, hence, there are obviously "file server use cases" where the existing mechanisms perform well enough.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 21:11 UTC (Wed) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by mathstuf
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

There's no point in special-casing "one-off opens" unless this demonstrably solves a problem. As then kernel open has to scan the directory, anyway, you'll end up with the exact same kind of TOCTOU races. This is a problem which can't really be solved. As to your other objections: These is a generic list of programming errors, some of them attributable to the idea with "a background thread".

It's possible to implement case-insensitive open in user space without doing a second linear search through a directory for every open.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:54 UTC (Wed) by TomH (subscriber, #56149)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by Wol
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Well firstly most things that people think are trunk roads (ie maintained by central government) aren't any more as they were detrunked so that local highway authorities had to maintain them.

The highway=trunk tag in OSM does not actually correspond to such roads - the name is basically the result of confusion back when tagging first started. Rather it corresponds to A roads that are designated as part of the Prinary Route Network which you can recognise by the fact that they have green signs.

Other A roads, which have white signs, are tagged as highway=primary while B roads are highway=secondary.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:53 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by Wol
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

A trunk road is one that Parliament or a relevant government agency have declared to be a trunk road and thus to have its maintenance paid for out of the Exchequer instead of by the county council.

Other than that, there is no reliable distinction. There are non-dualled trunk roads (like most of the A82) and dualled non-trunk A roads (the A2031 in Worthing is the one I can trivially name off the top of my head).

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:46 UTC (Wed) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by mpr22
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Top of any programmer's things to know about names list is that they're not unique. Someone who takes substantive action based on whether or not a name matches is wholly responsible for their own screwups.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:30 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

> Either the filesystem can reject any file name that is invalid UTF-8 (and fix any that are found on the disk) or to simply treat an invalid UTF-8 file name as it would be today, so there would be no case-folding or normalization.

Maybe having it reject by default, if only for a while, will prompt people to fix the tools generating invalid UTF-8 filenames in the first place. /usr/bin/zip is notorious for this; I've started using 7zip to extract .zip files because it gets it right.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:19 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by mpr22
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Note that the UK convention is also that main (A) roads are red, and minor (B) roads are brown. What quite the difference between a trunk and a main road (both being designated A class) is I'm not sure ...

Cheers,
Wol

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:17 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by rweikusat2
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Ideally this would be some kind of LRU cache which would have some flag to say "this is a one-off open, don't cache" to avoid the inotify (or whatever) mechanism. Plus, I'm sure folks would love having the C library run a thread in the background to listen for its notifications taking locks on this cache whenever something happens. Yeah, I don't see any race conditions, unpredicitable latency issues, or TOCTOU/cache coherency issues here at all.

Sorry for the snark, it's not in response to your comment in particular, but my mind coming up with all the Pandora's boxes this is threatening to open.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:05 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by rweikusat2
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Linux has no filesystem notification mechanisms that have required consistency and performance for a fileserver use-case.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 20:02 UTC (Wed) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by Cyberax
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

It could as well maintain a userspace dictionary mapping normalized/ lowercased names to their actual names (which could be maintained incrementally based on filesystem change notifications).

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:47 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by marcH
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Well, CMake has "is case sensitive" logic baked in at compile time. Apple and Windows are "always case insensitive" and everything else is always case sensitive. I don't know what kinds of changes would be required in build tools to do this case insensitive comparisons. For example, this just doesn't work with ninja on Windows (I assume make has similar issues with the analogous ruleset):

rule copy
command = cp $in $out
build foo: copy in
build bar: copy FOO

saying that no rule makes FOO even though technically it will exist if you build foo. Basically, build tools that exist today need cases to match everywhere. And yes, ninja could figure this out right now, but if `dir/foo` and `dir/FOO` is used and `dir` is made by some rule during the build, its case sensitive flag can't be known at the start.

Case insensitivity in filesystems is broken. Conditional case sensitivity at a per-filesystem level means even ninja needs to add ioctl queries to figure that out, but `--one-file-system` is something that is at least enforceable. Per-directory flags which require magical "what will the flag on this directory be in the future" is even more broken.

I'd be surprised if "doesn't work in case insensitive ext4 directories" (nevermind an environment with a mix of case sensitive and insensitive directories) issues don't get closed as WONTFIX in many tools.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:39 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by juliank
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

No, you can't.

Because people get murdered when you do that.

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:32 UTC (Wed) by ofranja (guest, #11084)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by jem
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

For the embedded market, it's usually the trifecta time-to-market/cost/power.

Synthesizing an ARM processor this size would be really wasteful on an FPGA. I don't see anyone doing that in a product without a very strong reason (and a very good margin as well, to buffer the excess cost).

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:30 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by hkario
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

> lower case "I" (India) in Turkish locale is a letter "ı" (dot-less i). And no, the "I" in Turkish is not any different than the "I" in English, German or Polish, it's the same Unicode codepoint.

For some strange reason many (most?) French people think the upper case of:
- é, à, ü, î...
are without accents like:
- E, A, U, I,...
but if you look at any half-professional book or [online] newspaper you'll find:
- É, À, Ü, Î,...

Windows keyboard for France (!= for French) makes it incredibly hard to enter the correct ones.

The spell checker in Microsoft Word has a setting letting you decide which one you think is correct:
https://www.pcastuces.com/pratique/astuces/1718.htm

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:25 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by Karellen
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

If you don't add case-insensitive version of open() and friends then every open() call will have to scan the whole directory first. This adds up quickly for Samba and other file-server use-cases.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:15 UTC (Wed) by juliank (guest, #45896)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by hkario
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Meh. Can just treat I = ı = İ = i

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:11 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by hkario
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Table of Contents of https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/nov/26/case/
"Truths programmers should know about case"
> - There are more than two cases
> - There’s more than one way to determine case
> - You can’t tell a character’s case from looking at it (or from its name)
> - Some characters have no case
> - Some characters may appear to have multiple cases
> - Case is context-sensitive
> - Case is locale-sensitive
> - Case-insensitive comparison requires case folding
> - Enough for now "still not exhaustive on its topic"

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:10 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by clugstj
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

Yeah - I wonder what is the specific use case that would not be solved better by having case-insensitive globbing and autocompletion in the shell? In what other situation does a program know that it needs to open a file, and knows the name of that file, but doesn't know the precise capitalisation/normalisation of the name?

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:08 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by clugstj
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

> I've yet to see a legitimate use case for putting this brain damage in the kernel

Without overly complicated code security researchers wouldn't have any work to do!

> Case-insensitivity would be set on a per-directory basis

Insanity has no limit. I was using the (otherwise pretty cool) Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is what happened:
https://github.com/vector-of-bool/vscode-cmake-tools/issu...

Because I was using the same project sometimes from WSL and sometimes from Windows, some directories *in the same project* were created case-sensitive and others not. Hilarity ensued.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 19:04 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: Case-insensitive ext4 by hkario
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

You can even have this with two processes for the same user, although it's less likely. It's not that unlikely.

It's a common defensive pattern to set the locale to something like "C" when you programmatically fire off utilities like 'ps' e.g. for portable process-id validation, and although this is can't produce as much confusion as turkish vs en_US.utf8, it can produce similar problems.

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 18:38 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864)
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

the problem is not the encoding of the file names on disk, as long as all the users of the file system (as in, the operating systems, thinking of a USB stick) what the encoding is, the exact one is an implementation detail - though the names need to be normalized before being written to disk (or read and compared with other)

what IS important is what LOCALE the file system, or rather the user, is working

lower case "I" (India) in Turkish locale is a letter "ı" (dot-less i). And no, the "I" in Turkish is not any different than the "I" in English, German or Polish, it's the same Unicode codepoint.

also, there's "İ" that is down-cased to "i" in Turkish locale, and again, the "i" is not special

combine this with two users that work in different locales on the same file system and "fun ensues"

Case-insensitive ext4

Posted Mar 27, 2019 18:12 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
Parent article: Case-insensitive ext4

I've yet to see a legitimate use case for putting this brain damage in the kernel. Does anyone actually have one?

The congestion-notification conflict

Posted Mar 27, 2019 18:11 UTC (Wed) by ajb (subscriber, #9694)
Parent article: The congestion-notification conflict

I took a look at the patent in question (at least the US version) and noticed the following, which gives some hope that the patent may not be as much of a blocker as this article suggests:

All the non-dependent claims in the patent (that is, claims 1, 14 and 22) seem to assume use of the 'proportional-integral controller', (a object from control theory which is used in AQMs). But, the dualQ L4s draft (draft-briscoe-tsvwg-aqm-dualq-coupled) gives, in Appendix B, an alternative to this called 'Curvy RED'.

( All the claims of a patent are either non-dependent or depend ultimately on one of the non-dependent claims, so when all the non-dependent claims rely on something then it is essential to the patent as a whole).

In email on the TSVWG list, Bob Briscoe, one of the developers of L4S, clarifies here that the dualQ part of L4S, to which this patent applies, is intended to be a framework into which any AQM could be dropped.

Accordingly, it seems to me much less likely that it would first appear, that Linux could be locked out of high-perf networking if L4S is the winner in this debate.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and it would be good if others could read the patent and post if they concur or not with my reading of it.

It is still less than ideal that the DUALPI source, which is posted for evaluation of L4S and for adoption into linux, has this patent hanging over it. The developers might be well advised to post a version which avoids the PI controller - unless they believe that ALu can be persuaded to licence the patent freely to OSS.

The congestion-notification conflict

Posted Mar 27, 2019 17:49 UTC (Wed) by ajb (subscriber, #9694)
In reply to: The congestion-notification conflict by mtaht
Parent article: The congestion-notification conflict

Thanks. I don't quite see how SCE can be useful without FQ, since if they are in the same queues client stacks are constrained in how differently they can respond to these signals without dominating or being dominated by unmodified client stacks. Hopefully this will be made clear.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 27, 2019 17:17 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by mathstuf
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Yes. The tiger_versus_python script takes as its source the preprocessed data from Nominatim, which is in the form of a bunch of SQL insertion queries spread across several text files. You should be able to generate an OSC change file just for your area by grepping for your ZIP code across all the Nominatim files and redirecting those lines to a file, which will then just have SQL insertion queries that has just the street addresses in your area, then running that through the script. You'll then get an OSC file with just the street addresses for your area.

Feel free to open an issue on GitHub if you run into trouble.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 27, 2019 15:52 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by linuxrocks123
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Is there some tool I can run to import TIGER data for my area and do spot checks before submitting to OSM? Better street address information would be amazing for my area since it seems to mostly be "scratch my itch" coverage and smaller establishments and residential areas are completely missing.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 27, 2019 15:27 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by bangert
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

The routing problem -- in the US, at least -- is because they never imported the US Census TIGER data for street addresses. Not being able to navigate to street addresses was annoying the heck out of me, so I wrote a Python script to create OSC change files from the US Census TIGER data, allowing the TIGER data to be imported into XML map dumps. Then, I used mkgmap to turn these maps into Garmin maps as is done for all OSM-based Garmin maps.

The finished maps are here (along with pure OSM Canada and Mexico maps for funsies): http://moongate.ydns.eu/tiger_versus_python/

The script to make the OSC change files is here: https://github.com/linuxrocks123/tiger_versus_python

The US Census TIGER data is a work of the federal government, and so is not copyrighted. The maps are therefore as Free as any other OSM-based maps.

I should mention that Ben Konrath, who runs openmapchest.org, helped me figure out what I needed to do for this project.

magic words

Posted Mar 27, 2019 15:15 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: magic words by Garak
Parent article: Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

The subject? You're now doing this on every thread where people have the temerity to disagree with you. The subject appears to be 'all subjects'.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 14:49 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by nix
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

That's good encouragement, thanks :-)

Reminds me of one of these "true crimes" programs I saw. The guy was accused of murdering his wife, but he said "we were crawling through the undergrowth, the rifle fell off my back and fired, killing her".

Despite the safety being on.

The prosecution said "we've tried every which way we can to make the rifle fire with the safety on, and we can't".

Then the defence said "let us have a go" and came back the next day with "we tried to reproduce the scenario described by the defendant, and the rifle fired reliably roughly 80% of the time".

Different approach, different outcome ...

Cheers,
Wol

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 14:15 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by jem
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

The hard CPU cores in FPGAs are typically ARM cores that don't have stellar performance (this is true even for Alterra/Intel). Putting FPGA fabric in a high-performance CPU approaches the problem from the other direction and is quite interesting.

I suspect, though, that any cool designs implemented in an FPGA will eventually migrate either to a hard core or into the CPU for performance reasons. I think the FPGA fabric is mostly interesting as a prototyping solution.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 13:02 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by farnz
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

Quite so. I switched to them ten years ago when I had a rain-induced intermittent fault on the line, so extreme that you couldn't even make a fault call to describe it because the chaos of crackling was so intense. BT, bless their little hearts, sent round engineers at pre-arranged times (when, of course, it was not raining) and then blamed me and tried to charge me for the callout. They did this despite the fault affecting half the town.

I switched to A&A -- for telco as well, so I had no conctractual arrangement with BT that BT could use to try to avoid interacting with A&A -- and A&A just kept calling BT out: BT kept cancelling the callout because nothing was wrong, whereupon A&A would wave the evidence of hundreds of linedrops whenever it rained in their faces and tell them, you have a contract, you are not providing the stated service to an acceptable standard, fix it. After a while A&A pushed me up to business-priority (free of charge) to give BT more, ah, encouragement. BT ended up closing the fault nineteen times before they considered actually doing their jobs and tracing the line fault and found a bunch of dry joints near the exchange equipment in the town centre. (These days, of course, with FTTC, they'd only have to fail to trace the fault as far as the cabinet...)

magic words

Posted Mar 27, 2019 12:50 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: magic words by Garak
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

Speaking as someone running all his own email from a home server... Cyberax's concern seems perfectly reasonable, and your calling it trolling, let alone harrassment, seems like an attempt to dodge the issue. One of the concerns about home server operations of crucial services *is* that great big dedicated teams behind huge central services can handle security better than you can. (The countervailing concern, of course, is that they are a much bigger target, but in the IPv4 world where worms exist that can pre-scan the entire address space and infect every vulnerable system in a matter of minutes I'm not sure that is terribly relevant. If your home servers were IPv6-only, perhaps... but even then, a mailserver needs an MX record pointing to it, and an attacker can trivially pre-scan all of those. So Curious Yellow-style worms atop zero-day vulns in popular mailservers remain a problem with home mail service...)

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 11:33 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by roc
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

The map application obviously knows which country the road is in, so it can render them appropriately, as long as the required rules and graphics have been programmed into it.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 10:41 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

British printed maps don't have the fancy shield logos, because British road signs don't have fancy shield logos.

British road signs and printed maps both use colour-differentiated boxes for numbers on motorways (blue with white numbers) and trunk roads (green with yellow numbers). Google Maps honours this practice for motorways at all zooms, and zoom-dependently honours it for trunk roads (zoom out and you get green boxes oriented to the X/Y axes of the map, zoom in and you get inline numbering along the road).

It doesn't honour British print map conventions on colouring the roads themselves, though. (If it did, motorways would be blue and trunk roads green.)

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 10:28 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Don't you want the map to render shields and other markings according to the country they belong to, not the locale of the client? If I was a visitor to the USA I think I'd want the map shields to match what I was seeing on the road, regardless of my own country's practices.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 27, 2019 10:00 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by bangert
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

I wanted to say the same, but you beat me to it :)

After using OSM for years I truly can't stand using Google maps anymore. It thrives on bling like street view and traffic information and what not, but it's a piss-poor *map*.

Now, I should probably finally edit OSM to remove the kiosk that it shows present on my corner but which hasn't been there for ages ;)

Debian project leader candidates emerge

Posted Mar 27, 2019 9:26 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Debian project leader candidates emerge by ssmith32
Parent article: Debian project leader candidates emerge

He may not be the most desirable person for the post (even if he was eligible) but IMHO some of the things he suggests are not entirely without merit.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 8:13 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by pr1268
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

When you use Google Maps what you use is a client. Unless you are a Google employee in the right department you don't the original data source.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 8:05 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Yes, several South American countries (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Perú) use identical shield logos (or nearly so) to those of the USA's (non-interstate) highways. Ecuador uses red and blue shields similar to the USA's interstate logos.

Google maps appears to use actual logos in representing highways; check out Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, or South Africa, for example.

The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

Posted Mar 27, 2019 8:04 UTC (Wed) by quozl (guest, #18798)
Parent article: The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

Recently I was contacted by one of the OSL team to help with archiving and decommissioning a forum instance for One Laptop per Child that had lost a DNS CNAME years ago. We had forgotten about it. It had apparently just sat there waiting for requests that never came. I was really impressed with the professionalism and care with which the ticket was handled. Well done!

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 27, 2019 7:15 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by mathstuf
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Does any other country than U.S use these shield logos around road numbers in maps? In any case it is a country-specific way to render some of the map data, so it does not make sense to put the shields into the source data format, which is meant to be applicable internationally. Clients are the proper place for such custom rendering.

Debian project leader candidates emerge

Posted Mar 27, 2019 6:54 UTC (Wed) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
In reply to: Debian project leader candidates emerge by corbet
Parent article: Debian project leader candidates emerge

>For the curious, this self-nomination is what's being discussed here.
Bizarre. To a completely outside and essentially ignorant reader, the letter reads like some sort of satire, where I'm missing all the references..

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 6:34 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by ofranja
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

Xilinx's solution solves what could be called the opposite problem by adding a CPU to an FPGA. The CPU is used for slow and complex sequential logic supporting the main function of the chip, which is implemented using the programmable logic. The idea is to save silicon area by including a hardwired CPU core instead of a syntehsized one.

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 5:50 UTC (Wed) by ofranja (guest, #11084)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by zdzichu
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

By last year you mean 8 years ago?

http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-news/embedded...

Client certificate support

Posted Mar 27, 2019 4:17 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: Client certificate support by morhippo
Parent article: Firefox 66 released

I expect it is more likely that Mozilla/Chrome etc will remove support for client certificates entirely (switching to Webauthn instead) than to put any effort into fixing the *terrible* UI they have or to add support for more use cases.

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 27, 2019 0:37 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by zdzichu
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

I like the cost column for the processor with the FPGA: "arm, leg"

Building header files into the kernel

Posted Mar 26, 2019 23:53 UTC (Tue) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)
In reply to: Building header files into the kernel by jsmith45
Parent article: Building header files into the kernel

> One word of warning: This basically requires CONFIG_TMPFS. It will also work if !CONFIG_SHMEM, because then it uses tiny-shmem (which is ramfs). However using CONFIG_SHMEM without CONFIG_TMPFS yields a tmpfs that is excessively limited.

It occurs to me that we shouldn't even have these options. The kernel would be simpler to reason about if basic, fundamental, and cheap things like tmpfs and shmem (and procfs!) were hardwired to =y. I've never understood the rationale for extreme configurability. Fundamental things should always be available.

Building header files into the kernel

Posted Mar 26, 2019 23:46 UTC (Tue) by jsmith45 (guest, #125263)
In reply to: Building header files into the kernel by adirat
Parent article: Building header files into the kernel

Sure, with the right flags you can get macro definitions in the DWARF data, and extract them. But apparently compiling the kernel even with the normal debug flags can cause compilation to be quite a bit slower, and generate an enormous amount of data, and this would need even more data.

And parsing out the correct set of macros from that debug info may not be entirely trivial. (Some macros may have multiple values in different spots in the kernel.) Even if those issues were solved, and we had the macro data to combine with BTF it is not equivalent to headers. One thing that does not get captured is inline functions defined in the headers. I've no idea if those ever get used in BPF programs, but I could certainly imagine that at least some of them may work (e.g. if they are just abstracting over a struct access). And those are impossible to extract from any form of debugging information.

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

Posted Mar 26, 2019 22:37 UTC (Tue) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438)
In reply to: Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging by arnout
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Thank you, I had totally not considered that. It would have been simpler. Very good thought.

In the meantime, I installed Markor and Mgit on my phone and blogged that way after all. Not that musings.danlj.org has that many visitors, so probably the tree fell in the forest and no one cared whether it made a noise.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 26, 2019 21:05 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap is great, but... by pr1268
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

OSMAnd uses proper shields for I- and US- routes. State shields aren't always correct though. But it would be nice if they were in the original data source.

OpenStreetMap is great, but...

Posted Mar 26, 2019 21:02 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

While I agree that OSM is a good example of collaboration, I wish it would use actual highway and interstate shield logos instead of those plain rectangular boxes with "US-40" or "I-75", etc.

These logos are not protected by copyright¹, so why not use them? It makes identifying highways a lot easier.

¹ At least in the United States. I don't know what kind of copyright protection exists for highway markers in other countries.

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 19:02 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by HenrikH
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

By future you mean last year?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-sca...

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 18:20 UTC (Tue) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by nhippi
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

In the future CPU:s should perhaps add a big chunk of FPGA and just let the kernel implement their own offloading algorithms.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 15:11 UTC (Tue) by TomH (subscriber, #56149)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by ntnn
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

See I would have guessed at MAPS.ME which has like an order of magnitude more users than OsmAnd.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 15:07 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by shiftee
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

There's also the StreetComplete app on F-Droid for finding missing information while you're walking around if you have free time while walking around somewhere.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 14:33 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by Wol
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

Well, AAISP are (IME) very good at getting the exchange-end equipment fixed for you (finding via their CQM that there's a reproducible explicable problem), or at least determining what tradeoffs you can make to get stability (e.g. slower speed such as 10 Mbit/s down and total stability if it's noise between you and exchange).

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 26, 2019 14:29 UTC (Tue) by higuita (guest, #32245)
In reply to: Firefox 66 released by flussence
Parent article: Firefox 66 released

it is not the same, but you have the add-on superstop, it will stop all javascript, animations and other trash. Recommended!

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 14:19 UTC (Tue) by ntnn (guest, #109693)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by TomH
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Yeah, I'm referring to OSMand (I've had to look it up) on fdroid (it's on Google Play as well, iirc).
I know they're separate entities, however I've never met anyone who didn't recognize OSMand as `the` OSM app.

5.1 Merge window part 1

Posted Mar 26, 2019 13:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: 5.1 Merge window part 1 by dvdeug
Parent article: 5.1 Merge window part 1

The painful part might be actually accessing a CD drive from inside the VM. Even with various forms of USB and ATA passthrough, in my experience it's still a toss-up whether that sort of thing works or causes an obscure and ridiculous error or even crashes the host (not with USB, but ATA/PCI passthrough is evil).

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 12:55 UTC (Tue) by TomH (subscriber, #56149)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by ntnn
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

There is no one "OSM app" I'm afraid.

There are lots of third party apps that use OpenStreetMap data, and I have no idea which one you are using but there will be certainly be lots of others to choose from.

There are no mobile apps made by, or endorsed by, the project itself or the OpenStreetMap Foundation however.

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 12:41 UTC (Tue) by ntnn (guest, #109693)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Yeah, we would've been lost in Ireland a few times if it weren't for OpenStreetMaps.

Most of the Hotels and Bed&Breakfasts we had booked didn't have an address and weren't registered in the cars GPS or Google Maps (nor any other maps service we tried later). With OpenStreetMaps via the OSM App we found each stop without a hassle.

Though the OSM seems to have gotten worse, at least it took ages to startup and the search didn't find anything related to my queries later on. I haven't used it since I got a new phone (roughly ~1y).

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

Posted Mar 26, 2019 12:11 UTC (Tue) by arnout (subscriber, #94240)
In reply to: Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging by michaelkjohnson
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

> I've been thinking about running Git on my android phone to push blog entries when I'm away from my computer

You can just use the online editor of gitlab, which also allows you to preview md files.

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:54 UTC (Tue) by darwish (guest, #102479)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by eru
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

And in any kind of a complicated “system” (sw/hw/teams):

https://lwn.net/Articles/783496/

Client certificate support

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:34 UTC (Tue) by morhippo (guest, #334)
Parent article: Firefox 66 released

Too bad firefox still does not support client certificates stored in the windows certificate repository (unlike chrome). This makes it impossible for many corporate users (like me) to use this as default browser. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1120350

I would love it if the mozilla organization put its focus on these basic things, please, instead of avantgarde things like " passwordless windows hello for windows 10"?

5.1 Merge window part 1

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:27 UTC (Tue) by wojtekka (guest, #131045)
In reply to: 5.1 Merge window part 1 by Wol
Parent article: 5.1 Merge window part 1

If there's a need for running a.out binaries without kernel support someone *will* come up with a solution. Huge part of the software I use everyday was merely *possible* at some point and most probably was not *practical* because there were already alternatives available. Just sayin'.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:18 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by farnz
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

When "the internet" comes up for renewal, I'll definitely look at switching.

Only thing is, if as I suspect it's the exchange, will that actually improve matters?

Cheers,
Wol

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:12 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Whither WireGuard? by nhippi
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

The phenomenon has been noticed long ago, it even has an entry in the Jargon file: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 9:44 UTC (Tue) by bangert (subscriber, #28342)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

I disagree. It is not on-par with brand-name streetmaps but in many areas surpasses it significantly. Both in detail and in update speed.

Now for traffic information and routing....

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 8:58 UTC (Tue) by shiftee (subscriber, #110711)
In reply to: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards by eru
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

I encourage anyone reading this comment who isn't currently an OpenStreetMap contributor to signup and try adding something nearby.
Pubs, restaurants or hotels are pretty simple

Whither WireGuard?

Posted Mar 26, 2019 8:58 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
Parent article: Whither WireGuard?

It's fascinating to watch the constant ebb and flow between CPU and accelerators. We find running things on CPU to slow or too power consuming, and implement specialized accelerator HW to deal with. Then we find the specialized HW to limiting and cumbersome to use, and retreat back to doing things on the general purpose CPU. Only to repeat the cycle in future.

Building header files into the kernel

Posted Mar 26, 2019 7:34 UTC (Tue) by minchan (subscriber, #61813)
In reply to: Building header files into the kernel by _joel_
Parent article: Building header files into the kernel

>> Also note that on Android, we don't use disk-based swap. We have a memory based compressed swap called ZRAM, but the archive is already compressed so the suggested idea would provide no benefit (to us).

zRAM supports idle and/or incompressible page writeback once admin configures backing store.
If the data is used rarely or incompressible, it will be written back to the storage from the memory of zram.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 26, 2019 6:52 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Firefox 66 released by flussence
Parent article: Firefox 66 released

> Quite right. There's been URL-spoofing attacks (in *2019*!) that rely on big-name mobile browsers truncating the hostname from the wrong end. If a trillion-dollar AI company can't get that right, it's obviously the wrong approach.

I wonder what percent of users would spot this though. I would be interested to hear a comment from a Firefox developer (roc?)

OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Posted Mar 26, 2019 6:29 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards

Congratulations! OpenStreetMap is a nice example of collaboration. When I first looked at it round 2010, it was still very patchy (and I helped fix some errors in my neighbourhood), but now it is on par with brand-name street maps.

The design of preemptible read-copy-update

Posted Mar 26, 2019 6:05 UTC (Tue) by firolwn (guest, #96711)
Parent article: The design of preemptible read-copy-update

Could anyone help me to understand the following sentence?
In contrast to SRCU, preemptible RCU only permits blocking within primitives that are both subject to priority inheritance and non-blocking in a non-CONFIG_PREEMPT kernel.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Mar 26, 2019 0:22 UTC (Tue) by naptastic (guest, #60139)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

The state of Utah does both of these correctly. When you enter the voting station, you verify your identity with someone who tells your precinct number to someone handing out signed cards that only identify which precinct (and thus which ballot questions to present.) The cards authorize one ballot, and have to be re-programmed before being used a second time.

The machines in Utah are made by Diebold, which is unfortunate, but they do provide a paper trail for people to physically see what's going into the tamper-evident canister, and thence to the safe. In the event of a recount, they get to figure out not only what the exact numbers were, but how far off they were from the machine counts.

(Source: I was a poll worker for the 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections in Salt Lake City. Also, there's no point stealing elections in Utah, so there's no incentive to sell them insecure models. Better sell them the more expensive, more secure models.)

webfinger

Posted Mar 25, 2019 23:31 UTC (Mon) by thebaer (guest, #130968)
In reply to: webfinger by corbet
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Yep, just followed 👍 (should show up on your stats page), and I can find your existing posts when searching for their URLs in Mastodon.

By the way, would love to know more about what caused the misconfiguration if you don't mind sharing, either in our fledgling documentation repo or our forum. That would help others potentially fix similar issues in the future.

webfinger

Posted Mar 25, 2019 22:49 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Federated blogging with WriteFreely by thebaer
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

FWIW I believe I have fixed this; I'd be curious to hear if things work for people now.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 25, 2019 21:18 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: Firefox 66 released by Wol
Parent article: Firefox 66 released

Quite right. There's been URL-spoofing attacks (in *2019*!) that rely on big-name mobile browsers truncating the hostname from the wrong end. If a trillion-dollar AI company can't get that right, it's obviously the wrong approach.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 25, 2019 21:00 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by Wol
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

AAISP do all the normal options - ADSL2+ (Annex A and Annex M) included. Back before FTTC was an option for me, I used two ADSL2+ Annex M lines to get me enough upload (4 Mbit/s was enough for me back then), and wrote this AAISP wiki page to explain how I split traffic across the two upload links from a Debian system doing PPPoA using an ADSL2+ card from Traverse Technologies. Nowadays, I'd probably buy a pair of Draytek Vigor 130s to act as PPPoA to PPPoE translators, then use PPPoE on the Linux side.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 25, 2019 20:33 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by farnz
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

FTTC is not an option for me - I don't have a cabinet. And I don't want it anyway because 17MB achieved is more than adequate for my purposes IFF it is working - I think I've "big red switch"ed my router about 3 or 4 times tonight because it just dies on me.

Cheers,
Wol

Static site generators

Posted Mar 25, 2019 20:26 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
In reply to: Static site generators by downey
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Excellent.

Disqus is just a comments-only plug-in => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus

Security quotes of the week

Posted Mar 25, 2019 19:17 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by rgmoore
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

More than that; most people who complete a basic education have enough comprehension of how ballot security might work to be able to take any given paper security measure and get a good "gut feel" for the cost/benefit involved. If I want to make the lack of a given security measure seem like an issue, I have to find a way to work around that gut feel.

In contrast, electronic security is still something that most people struggle to understand, and most people don't have a gut feel for which security measures are worth the effort; I can thus make an electronic ballot feel insecure by carefully deployed bullshit such that you can't tell whether I'm talking about a real issue, or a fake one. This means that I can destroy trust in a ballot whose result I don't like by pushing people into worrying about near-impossible attacks, while not talking about easy attacks on ballots whose result I do like.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Mar 25, 2019 17:45 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by nwrk
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

The big advantage of paper ballots is that they're a proven technology. We have literally centuries of experience with them, so we know very well where the potential weaknesses are and how to address them. Getting good security with paper ballots is mostly a matter of practice rather than theory because the theory is all well worked out. Since we don't have that degree of experience with electronic ballots, things are much less certain. We don't know for sure that everything is going to work well because we don't know for sure if there are serious problems we've overlooked.

There's also a very important matter of public trust. If the public doesn't trust the election results, they will be problematic even if the security was actually good. That gives paper ballots a lot of value because they are within the realm of most people's experience. They can understand the security problems with paper ballots once they've been explained, and they can comprehend how the security measures deal with those problems. At least as important, those security measures are things that can be done in public so the public (or its representatives from the media or political parties) can observe them and feel confident nothing is going wrong.

The congestion-notification conflict

Posted Mar 25, 2019 17:30 UTC (Mon) by jg (guest, #17537)
In reply to: The congestion-notification conflict by jch
Parent article: The congestion-notification conflict

Yes, there is a cultural gap with those who haven't dealt with FOSS. It isn't just an age issue.

But there is some correlation with age; UNIX was not FOSS, and I see correlation with gray hairs (of which I have more than a few). If my career had wandered off into other directions, I would not have the perspective I have.

And I've spend years working in the IETF, for better or worse.

The congestion-notification conflict

Posted Mar 25, 2019 17:02 UTC (Mon) by fw (subscriber, #26023)
In reply to: The congestion-notification conflict by mfuzzey
Parent article: The congestion-notification conflict

Extremely few people expose services running on mainline Linux kernels directly to the Internet. Pretty much all traffic is handled first on custom Linux kernels or completely different TCP/IP stacks, terminating the TCP session.

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 25, 2019 16:05 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by Wol
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

Not all - at least AAISP in the UK are still at that quality, although it's now a "here's an Openreach link, here's a small amount of IPv4, here's a /48 of IPv6, off you go". But I have a VDSL2 (aka FTTC, BT Infinity, Sky Fibre etc) connection, my Fedora box runs PPPoE over that link, and I get nice Internets from it.

Fixing programmers

Posted Mar 25, 2019 15:45 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Fixing programmers by Wol
Parent article: Cook: security things in Linux v5.0

I know it's well past, but I'll add that this convention long predates modern computers.

It was the convention on old green screen terminals. It was the convention on teletypes before that. Heck, it's the convention that first came about two centuries ago with the early typewriters!

Just changing the convection won't fix two centuries of training to do the opposite - since when did hitting "return" change the paper for you?

Cheers,
Wol

'reasonable' domain registration prices?

Posted Mar 25, 2019 15:32 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: 'reasonable' domain registration prices? by farnz
Parent article: Turris: secure open-source routers

My previous ISP (which no longer exists except possibly in name) *was* a very good ISP.

"Here's a dial-up, here's an IPv4, off you go ..."

Trouble is, most of the decent ISPs like that have been bought out by the likes of Clueless & Witless.

Cheers,
Wol

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