Hacker News: floatboth

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

floatboth — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:07:11 +0000

Qualcomm has several full time employees working on Mesa (Freedreno/Turnip). They probably must have access to some documentation now..

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

floatboth — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:05:24 +0000

Yes. It is on the mailing list: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251001-av1_irisdecoder-v1-0-9f...

It actually introduces new things into the UAPI because no one else did fully-stateful AV1 decode before.

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

floatboth — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:03:37 +0000

Which ones, where? On X1 laptops that shipped with Windows, you can only escape into EL2 via Secure Launch: https://github.com/TravMurav/slbounce

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

floatboth — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:02:05 +0000

Upstream would accept a patchset that exposed an independent Gunyah-specific UAPI (why not the same one as downstream — crosvm already supports that) instead of pretending to be KVM (it's not a "port", you can't port a hypervisor to a hypervisor).

KVM is available on current compute platforms (laptops) if you escape to EL2 via slbounce; and on Glymur (X2E) it will be available by default (yay!).

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

floatboth — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:58:53 +0000

X1E laptops have fully working DisplayPort+USB3+USB2+PD over USB-C unlike Asahi Macbooks :p There really aren't that many gaps in X1E laptop support left.

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

floatboth — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:57:09 +0000

EL2 is coming by default on Glymur (X2E) (yaaaay), can be enabled in config on some IoT platforms, and can be booted into via Secure Launch on previous compute platforms (Hamoa/Purwa aka X1E/X1P, SC8280XP), search for slbounce.

On phone platforms.. probably not? Or Android might want it for pKVM..

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

floatboth — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:54:28 +0000

Mesa MR for a8xx is coming. It's just not done yet. But they have full time employees working on Mesa.

New comment by floatboth in "DirectX 12 Support on macOS"

floatboth — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 07:09:39 +0000

From a quick look, the patch doesn't seem to contain references to Metal, but just a lot of random updates—backports from upstream Wine to the CrossOver thing?—including an AMD ADL implementation that is clearly for Linux (using /sys/class/… stuff). Maybe the whole toolkit is… literally just CrossOver?

New comment by floatboth in "OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux"

floatboth — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 23:52:34 +0000

Thinkpad x13s is an okay option, but Qualcomm is IMO more cursed than Apple

New comment by floatboth in "300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's total blocking time"

floatboth — Mon, 29 May 2023 17:27:41 +0000

Seeing "Sizzle" in that profile made me feel shocked. Uhhh Wikipedia actually still uses an ancient build of jQuery that does not take advantage of native querySelector at all?!?

New comment by floatboth in "Windows 11: TPMs and Digital Sovereignty"

floatboth — Sun, 07 May 2023 08:20:48 +0000

> Did you know that technologies such as Intel Boot Guard that have existed for the better part of a decade defend well against such attacks that might seek to overwrite flash memory?

It's rather funny to see Boot Guard as a "good" example here. Boot Guard is what's actually taking freedom away. With a vendor-locked Boot Guard configuration, you cannot replace the firmware with anything not signed by the vendor. Bye bye dreams of coreboot (until a private key leaks like it just did ha ha).

Netflix & co denying service to machines that don't pass Microsoft attestation? Literally who cares, just go to The Pirate Bay instead.

New comment by floatboth in "Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage"

floatboth — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 03:34:49 +0000

Wait so they… they have a hook in the mmap() equivalent that allows AV software to scan new pages mapped as executable? I see the reasoning but damn does that feel cursed.

New comment by floatboth in "Nvidia Unveils CuLitho: A “Breakthrough in Computational Lithography”"

floatboth — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 18:34:59 +0000

Mostly laughing rather than offended :D

New comment by floatboth in "Yet another keyboard post, or, introducing ErgoNICE"

floatboth — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 03:24:07 +0000

hi, author here!

New comment by floatboth in "The M247/DataPacket Problem with Mullvad VPN"

floatboth — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 01:36:01 +0000

And not giving website administrators the ability to GeoIP you.

New comment by floatboth in "The M247/DataPacket Problem with Mullvad VPN"

floatboth — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 01:33:39 +0000

Another really important aspect everyone is forgetting is the location privacy problem with being "naked" on a residential IP address. The best reason to relay your traffic through a provider like Mullvad is so that some random forum admin who disliked your posts doesn't GeoIP you down to your city district.

New comment by floatboth in "VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC"

floatboth — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 12:26:04 +0000

?? It's entirely identical to the desktop version. Desktop is just an electron wrapper that adds fancy integration like rich presence and in-game overlays and whatever else.

New comment by floatboth in "VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC"

floatboth — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 12:19:19 +0000

> multifaceted approach is important here

Valve is pretty good at this, and they don't even use kernel level anti-tampering as a facet. Trust factor, VACnet (machine learning) and overwatch (community demo review) add up to a system that's pretty decent at not matching you with cheaters if you aren't one.

New comment by floatboth in "The 13-Inch MacBook Air"

floatboth — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 17:28:10 +0000

All of those are "general purpose". That phrase doesn't mean "perfect official support for whatever alternative OS you like", it usually means something closer to "you are not forbidden from running your own code, even at a high privilege (kernel) level".

New comment by floatboth in "I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2"

floatboth — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 17:19:14 +0000

You can, why would that be the case?

MrChromebox currently publishes only RW_LEGACY firmware (not full ROM, only replacing the stock SeaBIOS) for AMD Picasso/Dali and Intel Tiger Lake devices, but a) that's enough to boot whatever you want and b) you can build your own full ROM.