Hacker News: sigmaris

New comment by sigmaris in "Flipper One – we need your help"

sigmaris — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:47:03 +0000

Since this is a portable battery-powered device, rather than first pushing to open-source the DDR training blob, which is non-resident in memory after it's done it's job and a fairly small binary (less chance for hiding bugs), I'd say it's more important to get open-sourced the support in the BL31 Trusted Firmware for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling of DRAM, and support for maximum power savings in suspend mode.

Rockchip have not fully open-sourced the DRAM DVFS support in BL31, but it's key to achieving full run-time battery life on portable devices - see https://xnux.eu/log/083.html

And the system suspend implementation that Rockchip did open-source in upstream BL31 lacks some functionality compared to their binary BL31, mostly about powering off as many peripherals as possible to save power.

I'm not saying don't bother opening the DDR training, just that these two things are much more important for a portable battery-powered device.

New comment by sigmaris in "Setting Up an RK3588 SBC QEMU Hypervisor with ZFS on Debian"

sigmaris — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:33:46 +0000

An NPU with no driver support in the main Linux kernel, only in a vendor-provided fork containing dubious-quality drivers:

https://forum.radxa.com/t/lack-of-concern-for-security-in-bs...

https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2024/03/rockchip-npu-update-1-w...

New comment by sigmaris in "So you want to make a Raspberry Pi killer"

sigmaris — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 19:33:44 +0000

At least as of last week, people (mainly at Collabora) are working on open-source support for Mali “Valhall” including the GPU in Orange Pi 5. It’s just sufficiently different from previous generations to need a new driver, and taking a while to develop.

New comment by sigmaris in "Apple Virtualization Framework"

sigmaris — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 11:32:56 +0000

This is higher-level than the Hypervisor framework; this Virtualization framework providers an entire VM with virtio peripherals including a display.

https://github.com/lima-vm/lima can use Virtualization framework for creating VMs, there is also https://github.com/gyf304/vmcli as a very simple CLI utility for running VMs, though it's not very actively maintained.

New comment by sigmaris in "Cybiko"

sigmaris — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 11:00:09 +0000

The ClockworkPi products, particularly uConsole, look like a reasonable modern equivalent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331139

New comment by sigmaris in "ClockworkPi – uConsole, “fantasy console” for indie game developers"

sigmaris — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 18:37:26 +0000

The actual SoCs used on each type of core module are somewhat well hidden (no mention on the main website as far as I can see) but can be found through a bit of research:

RPI-CM4 Lite: Broadcom BCM2711

A-06: Rockchip RK3399

A-04: Allwinner H6

R-01: Allwinner D1

New comment by sigmaris in "Why I left Pine64"

sigmaris — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:52:58 +0000

The boot ROM in the RK3399 in the PinePhone Pro has a hardcoded boot order, and doesn't use the special boot partition of the eMMC - it only looks for a bootloader on the data partition at a fixed sector (64).

New comment by sigmaris in "Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM"

sigmaris — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:26:47 +0000

I assume by "new API" for VMs on macOS you mean Hypervisor.framework, which is supported by qemu 4.0.0 and xhyve, both open-source. I wrote a blog article about using qemu with Hypervisor.framework to install Debian in a VM here: https://sigmaris.info/blog/2019/04/automating-debian-install...

New comment by sigmaris in "Open source Mali GPU drivers merged"

sigmaris — Tue, 14 May 2019 15:28:50 +0000

Generally the SoCs used will have a separate video encoder IP-block that's not part of the Mali GPU. For example the "Cedar" video engine on Allwinner SoCs, Rockchip's VPU, Samsung's Multi-Function Codec, Qualcomm's Venus.

New comment by sigmaris in "Nestle, Disney Pull YouTube Ads, Joining Furor Over Child Videos"

sigmaris — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:26:13 +0000

Instead of hiring enough humans to review the content they make money from, Google's approach to catching this stuff seems to be doing a global search for videos with "CP" in related text and auto-banning the channels: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47278362 and then claiming that they're making use of "artificial intelligence" to moderate the platform.

New comment by sigmaris in "Linux Kernel Through 4.20.10 Found Vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution"

sigmaris — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:37:00 +0000

Not totally certain, but I believe it'd be used if a userspace program used the Linux Kernel Crypto API, using a socket of type AF_ALG.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.11/crypto/userspace-if.ht...

New comment by sigmaris in "Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me"

sigmaris — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 13:12:41 +0000

In the UK there's an app available, https://gett.com/, which is very similar to Uber but hails regular, licensed taxis.

New comment by sigmaris in "Former Equifax Manager Charged with Insider Trading"

sigmaris — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 21:10:05 +0000

I'm in the UK and we certainly do have Experian, Equifax, and other credit reporting companies here.

New comment by sigmaris in "Apple's Remote Desktop client is bundled for free with every Mac"

sigmaris — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 17:35:26 +0000

nfs:// will also work in the Connect to Server window.