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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

    • your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.

    • use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.


  • It opens the door to more manufacturers since there is no ISA licence fees. While the AMD/Intel duopoly is being fairly competitive at the moment, it really doesn’t have to be. Only think back to how bad it was late 2000s to 2015.

    I imagine a plethora of core designers, soc vendors and platform creators filling their own niches; lowest cost, lowest power, HW accelerators, highest core count etc.

    I don’t see the raw performance of AMD/Intel being surpassed soon, just because of the sheer total R&D years each has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas better suited to a different architectural approach.





  • NT is not the majority of windows code though; for windows to be multi architecture, all of windows needs to work with the new architecture; NT, drivers & userspace.

    For Linux, if an existing userspace application doesn’t work in aarch64, somebody somewhere will build a port. For windows, so much of their stuff is proprietary that Microsoft are the only ones able to build that port.

    Not because “windows bad”, just a consequence of such a locked down system which doesn’t have anything open source to inherit.


  • Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don’t see it being used widely there for a while.

    In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a removedty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn’t require months of trawling through to fix issues.

    Now that I think about it, in 10 years I’ll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere…



  • I started using Linux maybe 5 years ago, just before DXVK and proton became a thing. The difference between now and then for gaming is night and day.

    If it’s on steam, there is a pretty good chance it’ll work. If it’s not on steam, it still might work through lutris.

    There are some holdouts like Riot games, but I haven’t owned windows in almost two years.