Hacker News: afr0ck

New comment by afr0ck in "Qualcomm to Acquire Modular"

afr0ck — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:06:59 +0000

Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.

New comment by afr0ck in "Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year"

afr0ck — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:07:53 +0000

It's also an opportunity, from a different perspective

New comment by afr0ck in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

afr0ck — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:46:41 +0000

Is this vibe-coded?

New comment by afr0ck in "Did the Linux memory management maintainer "just quit"?"

afr0ck — Tue, 26 May 2026 01:53:40 +0000

David Hildenbrand, another very involved memory management legend is picking up the role. It will be fine.

New comment by afr0ck in "The next two years of software engineering"

afr0ck — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:36:06 +0000

I created my first Linux from scratch when I was a freshman in college in a third world country (not India). Fast forward few years later, I now write Linux kernel code for a living. Not sure what you did wrong, bud, to end up miserable like this.

New comment by afr0ck in "Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5"

afr0ck — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:10:40 +0000

That's not how operating systems work. KVM is both an interface and a hypervisor. Just as we have different hypervisor implementations for amd, intel, arm and others all abstracted behind the same KVM interface, there is no reason the same can't be done for Gunyah. Userspace does not have to know anything about that. KVM already supports svm and vmx for amd and intel on x86. Why is something similar can't be done for Arm? Plus now there is pKVM.

I just don't understand this argument of a separate interface. The only reason you want to do that is to decouple from the KVM community, but that introduces a shit tone of duplicated effort and needless fragmentation to the virtualisation software ecosystem hindering your users from enjoying the existing upstream tools they already know about. In other terms, vendor locking and shitty downstream experience.

New comment by afr0ck in "Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5"

afr0ck — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 19:13:54 +0000

I worked at Linaro, who was contracting for Qualcomm. Qualcomm were pushing for some protected hypervisor called Gunyah (which had its own Linux interface and needed a new qemu port) that apparently no one liked. I tried to port it to KVM [1], but upstream folks (mostly Google) outright rejected the port. Otherwise KVM would have been available on QCOM boards. You can still try it. I have a Linux kernel and a Qemu port on my github [2,3]

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20250424141341.841734-1-karim.ma...

[2] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/linux-next/tree/gunyah-kvm

[3] https://github.com/karim-manaouil/qemu-for-gunyah

New comment by afr0ck in "Linux Career Opportunities in 2025: Skills in High Demand"

afr0ck — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:34:43 +0000

Linux kernel + bootloaders + firmware

The Linux kernel side is mostly device trees, device drivers and the like.

u-boot is very famous as a bootloader in the embedded space

Firmware for board bring up and devices

New comment by afr0ck in "Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025"

afr0ck — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:18:06 +0000

There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them). NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them). The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.

New comment by afr0ck in "AMD's EPYC 9355P: Inside a 32 Core Zen 5 Server Chip"

afr0ck — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 08:07:30 +0000

NUMA is only useful if you have multiple sockets, because then you have several I/O dies and you want your workload 1) to be closer to the I/O device and 2) avoid crossing the socket interconnect. Within the same socket, all CPUs shared the same I/O die, thus uniform latency.

New comment by afr0ck in "GigaByte CXL memory expansion card with up to 512GB DRAM"

afr0ck — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:32:20 +0000

I think Meta has already rolled out some CXL hardware for memory tiering. Marvell, Samsung, Xconn and many others have built various memory chips and switching hardware up to CXL 3.0. All recent Intel and AMD CPUs support CXL.

New comment by afr0ck in "GigaByte CXL memory expansion card with up to 512GB DRAM"

afr0ck — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:29:03 +0000

CXL uses the PCIe physical layer, so you just need to buy hardware that understands the protocol, namely the CPU and the expansion boards. AMD Genoa (e.g. EPYC 9004) supports CXL 1.1 as well as Intel Saphire Rapids and all subsequent models do. For CXL memory expansion boards, you can get from Samsung or Marvell. I got a 128 GB model from Samsung with 25 GB/s read throughput.

New comment by afr0ck in "Without the futex, it's futile"

afr0ck — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:29:16 +0000

It's not that deep. The futex was developed just to save you from issuing a special system call to ask the OS to put you on a wait queue.

The whole point is that implementing a mutex requires doing things that only the privileged OS kernel can do (e.g. efficiently blocking/unblocking processes). Therefore, for systems like Linux, it made sense to combine the features for a fast implementation.

New comment by afr0ck in "What does Palantir actually do?"

afr0ck — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 09:55:51 +0000

>right-wing religious revival rooted in Christianity, combined with technological acceleration and a reimagined political order that prioritizes heroic individuals and hierarchical impulses

Sounds like a fast path to totalitarianism a la 1930.

New comment by afr0ck in "Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?"

afr0ck — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 23:27:36 +0000

Inference runs like a stateless web server. If you have 50K or 100K machines, each with a tons of GPUs (usually 8 GPUs per node), then you end up with a massive GPU infrastructure that can run hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of inference instances. They use something like Kubernetes on top for scheduling, scaling and spinning up instances as needed.

For storage, they also have massive amount of hard disks and SSD behind planet scale object file systems (like AWS's S3 or Tectonic at Meta or MinIO in prem) all connected by massive amount of switches and routers of varying capacity.

So in the end, it's just the good old Cloud, but also with GPUs.

Btw, OpenAI's infrastructure is provided and managed by Microsoft Azure.

And, yes, all of this requires billions of dollars to build and operate.

New comment by afr0ck in "UK to buy F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers"

afr0ck — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:02:09 +0000

France has its own independent military production including jet fighters (Rafale), tanks, ballistic missile, nuclear submarines and nuclear heads.

New comment by afr0ck in "Making TRAMP go Brrrr"

afr0ck — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 17:28:31 +0000

I use vim with mutagen for syncing files. It's simple and works fine, but you have to duplicate storage.

New comment by afr0ck in "Karol Herbst Steps Down as Nouveau Maintainer Due to Linux's Toxic Environment"

afr0ck — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 11:50:22 +0000

All of this drama is coming from the Rust email thread. Please, explain to me how this is irrelevant? I have nothing against Rust in the kernel, but Rust people are definitely dramatic.

New comment by afr0ck in "Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead"

afr0ck — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:15:40 +0000

This is not how the kernel works. You cannot rely on someone's "commitment" or "promise". Kernel maintainers was to have very good control over the kernel and they want strong separation of concern. As long as this is not delivered, it will be very hard to accept the Rust changes.

New comment by afr0ck in "Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status"

afr0ck — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:32:30 +0000

> "some Russian-sounding names are banned, but we still have to demonstrate there is a due process".

That's not true! There are still many Russian maintainers in the kernel, but they are not based in Russia. They only banned individuals, based in Russia, who are employed by sanctioned companies.