Alternate perspective: I use the heck out of session restore, and it has driven me nuts that it hasn’t worked properly under Wayland.
I tend to use different virtual desktops for different projects, so being able to reboot (because of a kernel update and needing to load a module or something) without losing and having to rebuild that state is is super valuable.
…I probably should have checked the byline before posting. It does still come from the same material, just a little more directly.
There’s some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/“Project Y” effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like …20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about “Dynamic Instruction Scheduling” in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.
There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There’s a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP’s link.
That’s credible.
I find the hardware architecture and licensing situation with AMD much more appealing than Nivida and really want to like their cards for compute, but they sure make it challenging to recommend.
I had to do a little dead reckoning with the list of supported targets to find one that did the right thing with the 12CU RDNA2 680M.
I’ve been meaning to put my findings on the internet since it might be useful to someone else, this is a good a place as any.
On a fresh Xubuntu 22.04.4 LTS install doing the official ROCm 6.1 setup instructions, using a Minisforum UM690S Ryzen 9 6900HX/64GB/1TB box as the target, and after setting the GPU Memory to 8GB in the EFI before boot so it doesn’t OOM.
For OpenMP projects, you’ll probably need to install libstdc++-12-dev in addition to the documented stuff because HIP won’t see the cmath libs otherwise (bug), then the <CMakeConfig.txt> mods for adapting a project with accelerator directives to that target are
find_package(hip REQUIRED)
list(APPEND CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH /opt/rocm-6.1.0)
set(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER ${HIP_HIPCC_EXECUTABLE})
set(CMAKE_CXX_LINKER ${HIP_HIPCC_EXECUTABLE})
target_compile_options(yourtargetname PUBLIC "-lm;-fopenmp;-fopenmp-targets=amdgcn-amd-amdhsa;-Xopenmp-target=amdgcn-amd-amdhsa;-march=gfx1035"
And torch, because I was curious how that would go (after I watched the Docker based suggested method download 30GB of trash then fall over, and did the bare metal install instead) seems to work with
PYTORCH_TEST_WITH_ROCM=1 HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 python3 testtorch.py
which is the most confidence inspiring.
Also amdgpu_top is your friend for figuring out if you actually have something on the GPU compute pipes or if it’s just lying and running on the CPU.
Neat.
I set up some basic compute stuff with the ROCm stack on a 6900HX-based mini computer the other week (mostly to see if it was possible as there are some image processing workloads a colleague was hoping to accelerate on a similar host) and noticed that the docs occasionally pretend you could use GTT dynamicly allocated memory for compute tasks, but there was no evidence of it ever having worked for anyone.
That machine had flexible firmware and 64GB of RAM stuffed in it so I just shuffled the boot time allocation in the EFI to give 8GB to the GPU to make it work, but it’s not elegant.
It’s also pretty clumsy to actually make things run, lot of “set the magic environment variable because the tool chain will mis-detect the architecture of your unsupported card” and “Inject this wall of text into your CMake list to override libraries with our cooked versions” to make things work. Then it performs like an old GTX1060, which is on one hand impressive for an integrated part in a fairly low wattage machine, and on the other hand is competing with a low-mid range card from 2016.
Pretty on brand really, they’ve been fucking up their compute stack since before any other vendor was doing the GPGPU thing (abandoning CTM for Stream in like a year).
I think the OpenMP situation was the least jank of the ways I tried getting something to offload on an APU, but it was also one of the later attempts so maybe I was just getting used to it’s shit.
Don’t trust that they’re 100% compatible with mainline Linux, ChromeOS carries some weird patches and proprietary stuff up-stack.
I have a little Dell Chromebook 11 3189 that I did the Mr.Chromebox Coreboot + Linux thing on, a couple years ago I couldn’t get the (weird i2c) input devices to work right, that has since been fixed in upstream coreboot tables and/or Linux but (as of a couple months ago) still don’t play nice with smaller alternative OSes like NetBSD or a Haiku nightly.
The Audio situation is technically functional but still a little rough, the way the codec in bay/cherry trail devices is half chipset half external occasionally leads to the audio configuration crapping itself in ways that take some patience and/or expertise to deal with (Why do I suddenly have 20 inoperable sound cards in my pulse audio settings?).
This particular machine also does some goofy bullshit with 2 IMUs in the halves instead of a fold-back sensor, so the rotation/folding stuff via iio sensors is a little quirky.
But, they absolutely are fun, cheap hacker toys that are generally easy targets.
The argument was that if you put all your static resources in /usr, you can mount it RO (for integrity, or to use a ROM on something embeddedish) or from a shared volume (it’s not uncommon to NFS mount a common /usr for a pool of managed similar machines).
…that said, many of the same people who made that argument are also the ones that went with making it so systemd won’t boot without /usr populated anymore, so that feature is now less useful because it has to be something your initramfs/initcpio/whatever preboot environment mounts rather than mounted by the normal fstab/mount behavior, and the initcpio/initramfs/dracut schemes for doing that all (1) require a redundant set of tools and network configs in the preboot (2) are different and (3) are brittle in annoying ways.
It still works OK if you’re using a management tool like Warewulf to manage configs and generate all the relevant filesystems and such, but it’s a lot more fucking around than a line in fstab to mount usr once the real system is up like the old days.
Sure, drop me a note with the details and I’ll see if I can give you a hand. I’m not super expert in all the specifics of the Chromebook ecosystem, but I have good general computer/Unix skills and have hacked a couple so I know where to look for resources.
Relevant place to ask: I’ve been trying to find a reference for the earliest Emacs that could host a terminal emulator or subshell in a window.
Multics emacs appears to have had both split windows and a character-at-a-time input and output mode as far back as 1978 for use as a SUPDUP and/or TELNET client, which is currently the earliest I’m aware of. Ancient ITS TECO EMACS had splits pretty early on, and may have sprung the necessary character plumbing earlier - but I’ve never found any reference material to confirm/deny.
It’s a fringe to a larger interest, which is that I’ve been trying to document the history of terminal multiplexers, especially in the Window (1986)-Screen(1987)-Tmux(2007) tradition (as opposed to the historical meaning which we’d call terminal servers). I’m slowly becoming convinced they came about after the advent of floating window GUIs hosting multiple terminal emulators. If you were super connected and could get access to one, sometime fairly early in the window between the 1973 introduction of the Alto and the surviving 1979 manuals the Alto program “Chat” could run multiple telnet sessions in floating windows (I’m also looking for a more precise date for when Bob Sproull made Chat able to do that trick). Several other early graphical systems like Blit terminals (1982 inside Bell, commercial as the 5620 in 1984) and early Sun Windowing System of early SunOS (1983) could also do multiple floating terminal emulators, so they were common by the early 80s.
Because the 36-bit DEC lineage had pretty robust psuedoterminals all the way back into the mid 1960s ref, a lot of hackers did a lot of fun shit on PDP-10s with ITS and TENEX and WAITS, and Stanford and MIT had PDP-10s connected to fancy video terminals by the mid 70s, it’s IMO the most likely place for the first terminal multiplexers to emerge… if I could just find some documentation or dated code or accounts.
I have an ESP32 set up with Zimodem which just makes the ESP32 act like a Hayes modem that talks IP instead of phone numbers to the serial port. They’re a ton of fun.
FujiNet appears to offer a little bit more in the way of high level service translation.
Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever). Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.
I’ve never been much of a poster (not even 2 posts/yr for the almost dozen years I’ve had a reddit habit), but I was a regular commenter in various specific-interest subs.
I am, as a rule, no longer contributing content to Reddit, since they’ve made it clear they plan to finish their transition from “hosting communities” to “extracting value from users.” Frankly, it’s not as much of an imposition as I feared, because many of those communities seem to be broadly taking the same attitude.
I’m actively trying to comment heavily here to to try to help establish communities. If I had a little more free time I’d do some posting and/or try to help spin some successor communities for my interests.
Oh, it is, I just meant my instance has had its keys rebound so I haven’t run into that problem.
When last I looked miniflux wasn’t quite as featured a solution as I’m looking for (I keep a lot of notes and such embedded in my DB), but it is pleasingly simple.
Ah, I’ve had the googlereaderkeys plugin enabled forever so I don’t even know what their default keybinds are. Unless I see something super compelling (or a serious problem with tt-rss and its ecosystem) I’m unlikely to change, but I like to keep my ear to the ground on the space.
Since you’ve used both, what are your feelings on FreshRSS vs. tt-rss?
Around the death of google reader, I set up a tt-rss instance, imported all my saved stuff, and I’ve been using it continuously since (I’m technically in an unsupported configuration because I set it up long before docker became the preferred then only supported configuration, but it just keeps ticking installed like a normal piece of software on a rented VM).
I’m generally super pleased, and it’s my primary mode of content consumption via browser + Android App, and I use the “note” and “share with note” features pretty extensively to plumb to some other folks with similar setups.
Fox (the main tt-rss dev) is clearly an asshole, and there are some geopolitical complications because he’s a Russian national, but he’s made an excellent focused piece of software. I’ve considered looking seriously in to FreshRSS, but have a lot of inertia and at a glance it looks like it’s missing a few features.
I see a lot of articles talking about the white elephants that might be lost from public view, which is probably the biggest tragedy, using their KI-10 as an example.
The one I’m most worried about from that collection is that they have the last known operational CDC6000 series machine (Theirs is a slightly smaller CDC6500, the flagship CDC6600 is the machine that made Seymour Cray famous, it fucked so hard it was 3x as fast as the previous title holder when came out in 1964 and was still the fastest machine in the world until 1969… when it was replaced by the derived, upgraded CDC7600 from 1969-1975).
It’s a 12,000lb, 80" tall, 165" on a side monster that draws 30kW (at 208V/400Hz), I haven’t heard a plan for it, and there are very, very few possible long-term-secure homes for such a thing.
I guess it’s just not in the current auction so it isn’t drawing as much attention yet?