leonheld

I strongly recommend you to pick up H&P's Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface. I think you can really only appreciate their other great book, "A Quantitative Approach" if you properly learn a new architecture, then the big ideas behind "A Quantitative Approach" will really speak to you.

Organization and Design has different editions for RISC-V, aarch64 and MIPS. The MIPS one is what I learned computer architecture on and it's super solid.

I'm from Southern Brazil, I have churrasco, which is actual real barbecue :-P Sorry!

The only thing that actually makes me want to visit the United States: the National Parks.

This is hilarious (in a good way), I love it. Thanks for creating it.

Thank you Right to Repair and thank you Framework!

> When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was

This is an edit to the first section of the article. Seems like OP already had his mind made up about something he still doesn't properly understand.

It's a bit surprising seeing all the positive replies to this thread. In my experience (using GPT-3), the time I spend debugging the code generated by the AI is almost the same as if I was to write it correctly in one go.

The comprehension aspect kinda helps me sometimes, like when I need to understand some obscure shell script.

>SoC vendors should upstream their changes. But fat chance of that happening any time soon

I honestly do not understand why SoC vendors don't put the extra 1% effort in upstreaming their stuff. I've seen (and worked with) software that is lagging 3 to 4 years behind upstream developed by these vendors and if you diff it against upstream it's like 10 small commits, granted, these commits are generally hot garbage.

It's quite literally in the article itself:

"We will be expanding access Plus and Enterprise users will get to experience voice and images in the next two weeks. We’re excited to roll out these capabilities to other groups of users, including developers, soon after."

I've used Linux for more than 15 years now and my salary depends on how good I am with Linux.

Although I agree you learn a lot with these distros, nowadays I just want something that works out of the box. If you spend years professionally bringing up Linux boxes, you don't want to it in your free time...

Please, *please, do yourself a favour and go to the Van Gogh museum. Going up the stairs and seeing Gogh's life unfold is amazing!

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

From what I understand, most extensions work much better for Firefox (uBlock Origin being an example). What do Firefox users gain from this?

I feel like it's pretty great that people /don't/ know about Andreas' YouTube channel nowadays. Shows how much the project grew.

If I recall correctly, there is indeed a chapter about GPUs in the fifth edition. Maybe it's an appendix, but I'm pretty certain! :)

> Agonizing about being mainline is a distraction from getting things done, IMO.

Sometimes this hinders you and your customers from getting things done. Mainly because vendor kernels are, generally, really bad. Second to none other than their userspace drivers, and I want my users to be generally running a well-supported, solid software instead of whatever ${VENDOR} ships.

> USB, ext4, SD/MMC, SPI, I2C, PWM, GPIO, backlight, framebuffer video...all pretty mature now.

That's pretty basic stuff, but SPI/I2C drivers for example have issues /all the time/. It's just nice to get the fixes from mainline and integrate easier.

Other than that, custom SoCs are much more complex than the bread and butter you mentioned: NPUs, VPUs, signal processing chips etc are all a gigantic pain in vendor kernels, simply because the code is garbage.

An incredibly amount of hype was/is generated in Europe in regards to this term. Not really the good kind, in my opinion, a lot of buzzwords being thrown around in the higher research centres and a lot of public money being spent on not-so-well-defined terms.

I can understand the appeal. I have a 2018 MacBook air for that exact reason. Although it's slightly more useful becase having a proper terminal that can run Docker and stuff has saved my ass more than once.

I'd be down to replace it with a Chromebook if the model looks and feels as good as the air.

Just to be fair: it seems it has no "payment plan", but a one-time payment.

I think this is your blog, so I'm going to post it here because it is so great to look at!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/where-is-the-original-overv...

I'm not from the US so not really familiar with FCC regulations.

> If you've got silicon that has to conform with FCC regulations it's going to have non-modifiable firmware.

Can you explain 'why?' or maybe throw me a link or two? Thanks!

The processing overhead is pretty minimal (take a look at our iMX6ULL, for example), because the containers are just fancy processes at the end of the day. The only real drawback we see is boot time, but you can optimise that as well.

A lot of projects using Yocto are not even reproducible after a couple years because people forget to save `downloads` and `sstate-cache`, I might add.

I agree from an engineering standpoint but disagree from a market one. It would be a massive overhead for the market segment I mentioned before if they always went with "the best practices".

Source: same as you.

I don't think it's a that strange comparison when you start looking at the end customers. There's certainly a market, mainly small to medium scale industrial automation, that really wants to write custom software to control machinery, but doesn't have the necessary background to run a meta-distribution system like Yocto.

Most SoC vendors provide a Debian image precisely for this market segment. The thing is, a lot of the guys who need a Linux embedded system are not embedded engineers, so they greatly benefit from having something like Debian, which has infinite resources to build upon.

Cool, here's something I can talk about!

At Toradex we provide an operating system and OTA platform called Torizon which is Yocto-based but uses Debian containers with custom packages for hardware acceleration, so our customers have the customisation of Yocto (if they so desire) while getting a very familiar programming environment (Debian). "The best of both worlds", so to say.

Customers are very happy to not deal with the usual Yocto mess.

[1] https://developer.toradex.com/torizon/provided-containers/de...

Disclosure: I'm a software engineer at Toradex.

This is the real issue with adopting new architectures, imho. So many packages claim to support arm, for example, whilst not enabling the proper optimisation flags, rendering it unusable. A loooot of work we take for granted has been put to optimize things for x86.

>I have never paid any attention to that at all. It surprises me that some do.

Same. I'm only now realizing some people actually do care about that, from the replies to this thread. I think it's weird. I'm not religious (or theist for that matter), but caring about these things reminds me of Matthew 6:7-8:

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

But I can see how "gamefying" things to get improved consistency and thus better results can be beneficial to some. Not for me, sadly.

In the same vein, docussaurus[0] has been a pleasure to work with (not affiliated in any way). It's snappy, has a solid text interface, the search works etc...

[0]https://docusaurus.io/

>It hasn’t been reproduced

What? It has to start somewhere, doesn't it? Also, it clearly offers a basis for probabilistic analysis for future studies. How is this not science?