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nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

Yet!

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

Note within the domain of this problem was the point. Which means on the same machine, with the same architecture and both ends being C which is what the init system is written in.

You are adding more problems that don't exist to the specification.

As for strings, just shove a char[4096] in there. Use a bit of memory to save a lot of parsing.

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

protobufs / asn.1 / structs ...

Edit: hell even XML is better than this!

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

Well there sort of is but people don't tend to know or use it. If it's within the same machine and architecture, which should be the case for an init system, then a fixed size struct can be written and read trivially.

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

> If there are going to be systemd components that have IPC, then I'd argue they should probably use something standard rather than something bespoke. It's good to not re-invent the wheel.

This is my point.

My favourite DBus situation a number of years ago was a CentOS 7 box that reboot stopped working on with a cryptic DBus error that no one has ever seen before. I had to sync it, power cycle the node from the ILO card and cross my fingers.

I really don't give a shit about this. I just wanted to run my jobs on the node, not turn into a sysadmin due to someone else's dubious architectural decisions.

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

This is a quite frankly ridiculous point. Most of that garb came from the HPC people who built loads of stuff on top of it in the first place. It's absolutely fine for this sort of stuff. It's sending the odd little thing here and there, not on a complex HPC cluster.

As for JSON, are you really that short sighted that it's the only method of encoding something? Is "oh well it doesn't fit the primitive types, so just shove it in a string and add another layer of parsing" acceptable? Hell no.

nbbnbbon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

Lets take it a level up. I'm still not sure why we even need a message bus in there in the first place. The whole Linux boot, init, systemd pile is a Rube Goldberg machine that is very difficult to understand at the moment. The only reason I suspect most people aren't complaining is that our abstraction level is currently a lot higher (docker / kubernetes etc) and machines are mostly ephemeral cattle and few people go near it.

As for JSON, please don't even start me on that. It is one of the worst serialisation decisions we ever made as a society. Poorly defined and unreliable primitive types, terrible schema support and expensive to parse. In a kernel, it does not belong! Give it a few months and varlink will be YAML over the top of that.

nbbnbbon Mathiness

See you wrote it in a clearly understandable way without abusing mathematics or giving any credence to mathematics being involved in the concept.

nbbnbbon Mathiness

Using an equation to represent this is dishonest. It assumes linearity and proportionality between variables which may not be the case. Also none of the terms are really measurable. You might as well write statements instead.

I mean try defining waste and quality.

Fundamentally, and to use a non-mathematical term appropriately in context, it is a load of bollocks. It is used to make simple ideas look like they are rigorously defined to people without the tools to interpret them. And that is dishonest.

As for inappropriate statistical methods, survey companies are a breeding ground for providing tools which the results of are not interpreted with any statistical rigour or language.

Source: annoyed mathematician.

nbbnbbon Researchers seeing little evidence of benefit from co pilots

I don't have any formal data to prove this available without losing anonymity and probably getting sued by my employer but the introduction of them at my organisation correlates directly to a measurable rise in bugs and incidents. From causal analysis, the tools themselves are not directly responsible as such despite having limited veracity, but people trust them and do not do their jobs properly. There is also a mystique around them being the solution for all validation processes which leads to suboptimal attention at the validation stage on the hope that some vendor we already have is going to magically make a problem go away like they said they would at the last conference. I figure at this point the gain might be a negative on a social and human perspective the moment the idea was commercialised.

Urgh. I can't wait to retire.

nbbnbbon Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second

I wonder if this is a legal issue if they bypass HDCP and record or snapshot content from a privileged domain?