Hacker News: p_l

New comment by p_l in "A tale of two path separators"

p_l — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:24:27 +0000

Filesystems usually do not see path separators at all, it's something handled at VFS level

New comment by p_l in "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"

p_l — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:41:32 +0000

Actually the licensing issues were from Linux developers' side - Oracle has nothing to say (as the license to the code and patents was given before Oracle got their grubby hands), and Sun IIRC expected CDDL to work similar to the AFS precedent where non-derivative, non-GPL code was allowed into kernel.

The only lawsuit specifically about licensing was from few Linux developers through SFC who disagree with common consensus on how GPL applies in that case and sued Ubuntu for shipping ZFS as a module.

New comment by p_l in "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"

p_l — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:37:20 +0000

TrueNAS was major source of the myths

... because part of the company wanted you to buy their certified systems

New comment by p_l in "Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct"

p_l — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:25:46 +0000

It is, I was thinking more of the core of it. In the same way one might say modern Openshift is rebadged kubernetes, but I will admit it wasn't best word choice

New comment by p_l in "Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct"

p_l — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:02:01 +0000

The latter is IIRC rebadged KubeVirt

New comment by p_l in "Lisp's Influence on Ruby"

p_l — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:42:51 +0000

Matz directly credits Lisp (through Emacs Lisp) as influence in the design of Ruby and its runtime, with Smalltalk influence on the language itself, and IIRC Perl as "what was popular and we tried to replace"

New comment by p_l in "Linux 7.1"

p_l — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:39:50 +0000

Places that want to use Anubis but find the logo not professional enough are free to pay the author, IIRC it was major "professional support" benefit :D

New comment by p_l in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

p_l — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:47:30 +0000

Because people generally do not understand memory management, and by people I mean majority of programmers, leading to dumb tales about performance of GC vs RAII/manual or even glorifying RC

New comment by p_l in "The Future of wasi-gfx and wasi:webgpu"

p_l — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:51:42 +0000

Somewhat dubious claim if it was right or not, the only benefit was that asm.js was backwards compatible and set the stage for Mozilla to lose out by simply having the slower JS engine whereas NaCL/PNaCL proposal was "performance neutral" between browsers.

New comment by p_l in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

p_l — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:36:03 +0000

They used a lot of NASA resources to bootstrap, makes sense they later lobbied to destroy them once they could do the expensive testing on their own

New comment by p_l in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

p_l — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:40:27 +0000

Even in Apple land M1 isn't the first with unified memory - pretty much all intel on-chip GPU (Sandy Bridge and newer) count - it was even a reason for driver issues early in intel's new dedicated GPU lineup, as the drivers expected unified memory - but M1 is essentially modification of an iPad chip, and you can see "unified memory" there going all the way back to first chip Apple bought from Samsung to power iPhone 2G

New comment by p_l in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:21:23 +0000

O2 GPU was slower than other SGI options at the time, however it could use hilariously larger pool of memory without copying, which meant that O2 could use approaches that were punishingly hard (very tight transfer loops) or impossible (huge textures that couldn't be virtualized due to needing whole texture).

That was because unlike other GPUs at the time, O2's didn't have dedicated memory but shared the memory with CPU - way slower, but zero copies and bigger.

Arguably early home computers and workstations also used "unified memory" :D

New comment by p_l in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:18:10 +0000

Every AMD APU since introduction of HSA did it, which is how AMD ended up doing SoCs for PS4, PS5, and Xbox

New comment by p_l in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:17:13 +0000

SGI O2 was the famous "unified memory architecture" graphics system, two years before i740 that didn't really do UMA.

O2 was popular in systems where large textures or textures generated dynamically (like mapping external video input to texture) was important

New comment by p_l in "I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:22:25 +0000

And don't forget it's not really about chipset, it's about market segmentation and up selling you for setting a boolean flag in firmware.

New comment by p_l in "I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:15:59 +0000

Surprising amount of gear required extra licenses or even parts to have fully functional remote console that does all the stuff PiKVM 4 brings to the table, and not always do you have the benefit of properly operational netboot infrastructure (especially in corporate settings with their usually broken by design networks) - and remote boot media might be gated behind license.

So you end up with ipkvm because there might be windows server that requires remote display, or because for various reasons IPMI SOL or equivalent does not work properly (BIOS mode enabled instead of UEFI, SOL requiring extra license, etc). Or even not being able to setup autoconfiguration for BMC but for various reasons it's easier to setup ipkvm.

New comment by p_l in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

p_l — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:45:00 +0000

And so easy to make into bottleneck.

Yes, zygote pattern makes it easy to make fork() into bottleneck - it requires a lot more discipline and low level tricks (linker scripts, compiler-specific extensions, custom sections, low level dependencies on pagesize that get "fun" on ARM servers).

If you don't, you might wake up with fork() causing latency issues.

New comment by p_l in "Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux"

p_l — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:14:07 +0000

It's called prerendering tabs or something :V

At 4k it adds up, especially since if you look into DevTools Chrome actually renders more at least vertically if not across major scroll regions.

New comment by p_l in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

p_l — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:44:03 +0000

Also sometimes you have few big companies dominate local market to detriment of choice, even if your plan is on getting further away.

The polish company I mentioned was infamous for using still in education students especially from an university where its founder was a professor, and for his motto of "you can replace any specialist with finite number of students, and the number is usually one". I met some of them later who worked there for first few years only to setup conditions to jump ship.

But along the line I heard how few big outsourcing/consulting companies dominated IT hiring in bunch of cities in Poland, with Warsaw being the odd one out because suddenly you had to fight for candidates with 100-150 person "minnows". I imagine without such minnows finding sensible work would be way harder

New comment by p_l in "Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux"

p_l — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:58:07 +0000

You mean Chrome? (Looking at the 5GiB usage here...)