CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@whitequark @valpackett Ah, that's not what I meant. Sorry, I meant two different things.

UnifiedPush works completely in userspace

@whitequark @valpackett CP has BootROM that verifies signatures, I tried bit-flipping the firmware package it loads from modem partition and that broke the modem

@whitequark @valpackett then you will be horrified to find out that smasnug modems (Samsung phones with Exynos SoC, Google Pixel 6 and newer) have a modem where ARM SoC (Control Processor, "CP") running ShannonOS (RTOS) is connected over PCIe and it's running a full IP stack on that RTOS.

AFAIK UnifiedPush does exactly that, I've seen a presentation about it and it acts kinda like GSF do.

@valpackett I had similar thoughts, together with "wake up only bare minimum" (single CPU core, modem and ADSP, leave DSI, CSI, I2C/SPI/UART blocks in suspend (if possible, not sure if this can be done... I guess you can tell pinctrl to leave pins in pull-down mode?)

We don't need to wake up the entire SoC for this, which would drastically reduce the power draw (and therefore the battery life)

@pj yes, but pushing spyware, online accounts/ads started in Win 10. I remember when people found that beta builds of Windows 10 were taking periodic screenshots of your desktop and uploading them to microsoft's servers, at some point it even had a keylogger that sent your keyboard inputs as well.

Somehow... people completely forgot that happened and attributed it to beta builds but it still wasn't okay

@pj 5 years? This started with Windows 10 in 2015... 11 years ago.

@TheOneDoc @lanodan @moses_izumi @mgorny speaking of Chimera, I've seen someone on IRC complaining they couldn't run musl-based system (Chimera, Alpine) because they had an Nvidia card.

I don't know specifics as to why because I haven't had any Nvidia cards in the past decade, but I got a cursed idea: rolling glibc libraries in /usr/local/lib and patchelf'ing the living crap out of nvidia's userspace stack. It probably would blow up spectacurairly, but it would still be fun to try running userspace driver stack on glibc and rest of the system on musl.

(...can you tell why computers fear me?)

@karolherbst this can't be true

@mgorny @lanodan Gentoo at least has (excellent) documentation and is easy to use. Most NixOS users I spoke to had no idea how their system *actually* worked

Just one example: at GPN2023 someone wanted to borrow my PC because their NixOS install wouldn't boot and I was like "uuh... no? i can take a look if you bring your drive though".
It was installed in "BIOS" (legacy) mode so I just shrank ext4 partition to make space for 512MB vfat, ran grub-install to that and other basic misc stuff you need to do while installing GRUB. Tried to boot it on my system (coreboot+edk2, so UEFI only) and it booted into their desktop first-try.
Then I handed them the drive back and they asked me if updating NixOS would break it and I was like "heck if I know, I don't use NixOS" (technically it shouldn't, but it's really weird and cursed from what I've seen so far so who knows).

@lanodan @mgorny then I must be even weirder than people realize, I started using Gentoo in 1st year of high-school (age 15/16), ~2013. Then I stopped using it around 2021 and now I'm back again.

That being said, I don't think many teenagers would mess with Gentoo these days. Commodity of cheap but powerful hardware and smartphones really damaged the "hacker spirit" among teenagers, back then you had to somewhat understand computers to use them. These days it's all locked down so that advertising companies can serve you non-stop brainrot and monetize your attention *old woman yells at modern technology*

@moses_izumi I left Chrultrabook project. We're forking it to focus on what matters to us, without having to deal with screaming children or vibe-coding.

God, I hate EDK2 <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://donotsta.re/emoji/akko/akko_angry.png" title=":akko_angry:" />

[DEBUG]  BS: callback (0x5c6c563c) @ src/soc/amd/common/block/psp/psp.c:126 (12 ms).
[DEBUG]  BS: BS_PAYLOAD_BOOT entry times (exec / console): 0 / 73 ms
[DEBUG]  mp_park_aps done after 0 msecs.
[DEBUG]  Jumping to boot code at 0x00803b3f(0x5c61d000)
[SPEW ]  CPU0: stack: 0x5c6cbd60 - 0x5c6cdd60, lowest used address 0x5c6cc2cc, stack used: 6804 bytes
[SerialPortLib] SerialRegisterBase: 0x1C200FEDC9000, BaudRate: 1, UseMmio: 8417528
[SerialPortLib] UART already initialized, skipping reinitialization
[...]
AP Loop Mode is 1
AP Vector: non-16-bit = 5C04D000/48D
WakeupBufferStart = 87000, WakeupBufferSize = E5
AP Vector: 16-bit = 87000/39, ExchangeInfo = 87040/A5
CpuDxe: 5-Level Paging = 0

DXE_ASSERT!: [CpuDxe] IoLibGcc.c (211): (Port & 3) == 0

Hot take but I really don't know what people are doing on their systems to upgrade them every 2-3 years.

I've seen someone describing GPUs like RTX3060 as "old" and I'm like "perfectly good GPU that lets you play any game you want?!".

We've gotten to the point where almost any piece of hardware (except for Celerons or cheap ARM SoCs) made in past ~6 years is good for any use-case.
Call me crazy, but my main workstation literally has a:
- Laptop CPU from 2021 (Engineering Sample of i9-11980HK)
- 32GB of DDR4
- Radeon RX7800XT (that I almost never used due to lack of time etc)
- Optane 900P 280GB (that I received from Intel few years back, perfect for a work drive)
- Kingston KC3000 1TB NVME

I do heavy stuff like compiling Linux kernel on this system and it's perfectly reasonable. I can play any game I would ever want on this system. I feel literally zero need to upgrade.

Same goes for my main laptop which I received from community member back in ~December 2022 to mainline it. It's a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook (Google/Hatch/KOHAKU) with:
- i5-10210U
- 8GB DDR3L
- 1TB NVME
- 4K AMOLED screen (touch, pen)
- Weights ~1KG, charges with any USB-C charger
- Great backlight keyboard, WiFi 6 etc.

Once again, it's a 6 year-old laptop. Of course I'm not going to compile a Linux kernel on it, but nothing stops me from SSHing into my workstation at home (or even container at work if I need to build something like OpenBMC) and using it essentially as a terminal.

Smartphones? Same thing. I bought a Google Pixel 6 back in 2022, it still has a great camera, performance and whatnot. Why would I want to replace a perfectly working phone just because it's ~4 years old?

People really need to stop following trends and consider upgrading their hardware only when it stops serving their purposes.
You (usually) don't miss anything by having older hardware, just some "nice-to-haves" that don't make a difference in grand scheme of things.

I have to say that using Linux on a phone feels... nostalgic? Kinda like Windows Mobile PDAs used to or Android in the very beginning (in a good way).

These days mobile OSes obscure everything from the user, actively punishing them for rooting their devices or instaling custom builds.

Linux on the other hand feels like ~2008. You have apps for daily needs (like you did on PDAs back in the day), you can consume media (reading books, watching movies, listening to music).

But if you're a curious person... there's a terminal. You can see exactly what your device is doing and how it works. You want to know which GPS satellites can see you? No problem, just query the modem-manager or use simple GUI app that will tell you the name of a satellite and which system/country it belongs to (turns out my device supports GALILEO, neat!).

Im really enjoying it. Two years ago I would say it was still unusable, but now (despite WiFi, Audio and Cameras not working on my device yet) it's... neat.

(Post written from xiaomi-pyxis running postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile while walking back home from a supermaket btw)