The only thing I've found that's annoying with these POS/Office builds across various brands and models from 2013-2017 is the PSUs are less reliable and end up failing if you're doing more than just running excel and outlook. The OEM PSUs are often priced at ~25-70% of the value of the entire machine. I've seen some people end up cutting a hole in the case and bolt an ATX PSU to the exterior.

ZFS is an out of tree filesystem, so one can not expect everything to go smoothly with kernel upgrades (it's recommended to hold kernel upgrades for production with ZFS, and test thoroughly, but here 6.12 is already a default for trixie), so this commit is a good road-sign to throw up infront of users to stop and think. Debian's opt-in usage stats (popcon) suggests that ZFS usage is a bit of niche, but I figured it is post worthy here, as some of us are in exactly that kind of niche.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.12/admin-guide/kernel-par...

The defconfig for applicable platforms sets preempt=voluntary https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

At boot, on Debian trixie the preempt setting is printed: May 28 22:58:07 foo kernel: Dynamic Preempt: voluntary

Description from the 6.12 Kconfig: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

> This option reduces the latency of the kernel by adding more "explicit preemption points" to the kernel code. These new preemption points have been selected to reduce the maximum latency of rescheduling, providing faster application reactions, at the cost of slightly lower throughput.

> This allows reaction to interactive events by allowing a low priority process to voluntarily preempt itself even if it is in kernel mode executing a system call. This allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is under load.

It is possible to boot with preempt=none on 6.12, and on 6.13 preempt=lazy was introduced, where "the task gets one HZ tick time to yield itself" before being forced.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/admin-guide/kernel-par... https://lwn.net/Articles/994322/

Linux 7.0 retains preempt=lazy and preempt=full, and there was a recent HN discussion of PostgreSQL navigating the change on the LKML:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644864 https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/yr3inlzesdb45n6i6lpbimwr7b25kqk...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307945

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code.

I deleted my own negative rant about SSD manufacturers not opting in to lvfs/fwupd when drives have a high risk of bricking without firmware updates.

Comparatively the leading alternative was a dumpster fire of a broken mess for the longest time on Linux. All through the 2000s, ATi provided a binary blob driver known as fglrx which some people joked was a half-baked codebase from somemthing that started on HP-UX, passable enough for running sales demos and then was thrown at an intern to port it to Linux. If you went with ATi and tried to do much with foss opengl programs, you could expect daily or weekly kernel panics and performance that was <50% of that of the windows driver for an identical build. The solution was always to buy nvidia if you wanted stability.

Nothing has really changed for Nvidia on Linux, it still continues to perform adequetly. Plenty of people, including myself have used the binary blob for games and other 3D software with wine through the late 2000s, 2010s and proton in the 2020s without much comment because it works fine. The exception being that if you buy a used card, coming up on 10+ years old because your requirements are minimal - don't expect current driver support. Nvidia drop support for old cards on Windows too.

AMD is definitely night and day in terms of meeting the free software ecosystem properly, and so arguably the reason to go with a new AMD card is voting for that kind of support with your wallet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943499 - 44 CVEs trying to replace coreutils with a greenfield rust rewrite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921079 - Shoehorning AI stuff into Ubuntu is the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileZilla#Bundled_adware_issue...