Austin Shafer @ashafer@fosstodon.org

Introducing Pinch, a borrow-checked language that demonstrates the power of LLVM's Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR).

MLIR is one of the coolest new compiler projects. It allows multiple languages to share high level analysis and optimizations by transforming IR dialects.

https://badland.io/pinch.md

As part of my advanced network security class I did a usability evaluation of some common tasks in the #Qubes operating system.

Qubes runs all applications in separate VMs, and does an excellent job designing their interface to maintain isolation. Give it a try!

If anyone needs help falling asleep you can find the paper here:
https://badland.io/static/A_Usability_Evaluation_of_QUBES_OS.pdf

To anyone using #vulkan with #freebsd on intel machines, you might need these two things:

Patch for Mesa:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=244877

The latest drm-kmod:
https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm/pull/207/commits

Unfortunately, for now you'll have to run vulkan apps as root

It's always nice when rewriting something drops the CPU usage from 100% per thread to 6%.

#feelsgoodman

It's funny that the best way to learn device standards like wifi 6 and architectures like Turing is to first read all of the previous specs and then see what's been added in the latest generation.

Bro I'm 22 and I need to read 22 years worth of documents before I'm up to speed on how to write drivers.

That unreal 5 demo is incredible. I'm dying to know how they made streaming meshes so performant.

If streaming film quality assets requires a hyper-fast m.2 like in the PS5, will games even be able to expect players to have that kind of power? Next-gen consoles might but not all PC players will.

At the moment it's recommended to have state-of-the-art storage, in the future it might be mandatory for games that do this kind of streaming.

Introducing Pinch, a borrow-checked language that demonstrates the power of LLVM's Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR).

MLIR is one of the coolest new compiler projects. It allows multiple languages to share high level analysis and optimizations by transforming IR dialects.

https://badland.io/pinch.md

As part of my advanced network security class I did a usability evaluation of some common tasks in the #Qubes operating system.

Qubes runs all applications in separate VMs, and does an excellent job designing their interface to maintain isolation. Give it a try!

If anyone needs help falling asleep you can find the paper here:
https://badland.io/static/A_Usability_Evaluation_of_QUBES_OS.pdf

Day 30-something of quarantine: My dad has decided to build a secret room behind a bookshelf.

Much like how Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, #llvm developers use every part of the C++ spec. This is making me reevaluate my prior assumption that I actually know this language.

Currently having an arm-wrestling match with the C++ compiler over implicitly-deleted copy constructors.

God I miss rust. Or C. Or anything else.

@stsp I'm reading through the #FreeBSD rtwn driver that seems to be a descendent of your #OpenBSD driver and I'm curious what hardware documentation (if any) you referred to while writing it? I can't seem to find any datasheets or anything online, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

I have a netgear A6100 that is excruciatingly slow and I'm trying to figure out why.

Pretty disappointed with attempting to install #qubes. With hypervisors and physical machines alike it just won't run.

The only thing that could run it at all was #bhyve, but it doesn't support the required nested virtualization.

To any other rustaceans, don't use mpsc::Receiver::recv_timeout:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/39364

Use try_recv and add thread::sleep instead.

https://github.com/thomaxius-and-co/lemon_bot_discord/commit/457de8e0e0a7dfb6f33b72606375cec3f65be2dc

Here's to hoping the bug, which is originally from 2017, will be fixed soon.

If you're bored in quarantine and think compilers/GPUs are cool give this paper a read.

HPVM - Heterogeneous Parallel Virtual Machine. They create a virtual instruction set for parallel processors whose IR can be translated into GPU (Nvidia, intel) or multithreaded CPU code.

http://rsim.cs.illinois.edu/Pubs/17-PPOPP-HPVM.pdf

Does anyone know how mastodon efficiently aggregates the federated timeline? I don't know ruby so reading the source isn't going well.

I can find loads of docs on the API and how to use it, but none on how it works.

#mastodon #fediverse

You would think that display planes in #vulkan would correspond to a drm plane in mesa, but nope. Instead drm connectors are used.

I think switching mesa to use drm planes would allow for hardware compositing, but would probably involve a significant amount of work. It would be extremely useful to #wayland compositors though, and would offer some real efficiency improvements.

#GhostBSD is a desktop distro of #FreeBSD, but it seems to consistently be ahead in benchmarks.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dfly58-freebsd121-ubuntu2004&num=9

They must have played with some lesser known compilation options. If anyone knows what they did I'd be very curious to hear.

Now that I've poked around a bit I guess I should write an #introduction

I'm a grad student interested in operating system design and computer graphics. Favorite language is C, although #rust has quickly become a close second. I also enjoy contributing to #FreeBSD, and lately I've been really enjoying the #vulkan graphics api.

One of my course projects involves building a language using #mlir, so if anyone has experience developing with #llvm I'm all ears.

Arachnid Factoid: If you press 'C-h h' in emacs it will bring up translations for the word hello in every language.

The original purpose seems to be to demonstrate how international text is rendered.