A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It’s much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor’s memory through DMA.

Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn’t affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

**In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.

https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/054_nvme/

Summary: two Silicon Power P34A80’s died within a few months of use, the second one was the warranty replacement of the first. In both cases sectors suddenly became permanently unreadable.

In Kerbal Space Program your ships sometimes catch the NaN virus. If one fuel tank level is reading NaN then whatever you do DON’T try and fill it from another (full) tank. I’m not sure if it can spread to physics (thrust, mass, etc) EDIT: Yes it can happen to physics, oh dear.

I wonder what would happen if you landed a NaN-infected spaceship on a planet.

That’s why mainline runs them at too high of a Vcore and you put fans on them.

Never use an SoC that’s not at least 5 years old ;)

SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.

USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.

SBC = Single Board Computer.

I wouldn’t attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I’d go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

• PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
• Laptop docking connectors (I can’t find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it’ll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
• Firewire (if you’re lucky, way too old to be found now)
• If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)

I recommend using a different set of flags so you can avoid the buffering problem @thenumbersmason@yiffit.net mentions.

This next example prevents all of your ram getting uselessly filled up during the wipe (which causes other programs to run slower whenever they need more mem, I notice my web browser lags as a result), allows the progress to actually be accurate (disk write speed instead of RAM write speed) and prevents the horrible hang at the end.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/somedisk status=progress oflag=sync bs=128M

“oflag” means output flag (to do with of=/dev/somedisk). “sync” means sync after every block. I’ve chosen 128M blocks as an arbitrary number, below a certain amount it gets slower (and potentially causes more write cycles on the individual flash cells) but 128MB should be massively more than that and perfectly safe. Bigger numbers will hog more ram to no advantage (and may return the problems we’re trying to avoid).

If it’s an SSD then I issue TRIM commands after this (“blkdiscard” command), this makes the drive look like zeroes without actually having to write the whole drive again with another dd command.

Yeah not one mention of “I’ll never forget you Princess”

My favourite is a forum question about a first-person shooter called “Still Not Dead” where you are chased by zombies, floating skulls and spiders carrying upside-down crucifixes: Does this have any satanic references in it?. Good quotes:

I would buy the game if it didn’t have any of that stuff in it.

I already told you why, I hate 666 and pentagrams

Preach!

We definitely need more games changed. I consider it to be the major victory when we petitioned that satanic game DOOM to be changed and got Super 3D Noah’s Ark

I’m very curious about the downvotes to this one. May I ask people’s thoughts? Perhaps I’m too vague? I can put a bigger story about my experiences with various init systems in production & research if people are interested.

https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

A custom discord client that supports streaming with audio on Linux

Jaysus, I wish this were a world where stuff like that wasn’t necessary.

Uneducated question: what’s the benefit of a dedicated client over running it in a normal browser?

That absolutely sucks :| Thankyou for the detail.

The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…

I probably made the overlap unclear, sorry:

• Pipewire issues: My 2023 desktop and 2016 laptop, very different hardware.
• Pulseaudio issues: All of my pre-2023 desktops and several family laptops

I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us).

Eep, that’s annoying. You also probably don’t have direct interaction with the users most of the time (they’re not your customer) which makes this worse, people in a vacuum follow each other’s stories.

In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)

There might be a bias here because these problems are not persistent, ie a reboot fixes them.

In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.

That’s potentially more things different distros can do differently and more issues your middleware will start getting blamed for.

Yes it’s not a problem for user-friendly distros, but why does the user friendliness problem exist anywhere anyway? It’s better to fix problems upstream, not downstream.

If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now

I think that’s a “winners write history” situation. There were other options at the time that might have been better choices. Everyone uses it now because of Redhat and Debian being upstream to most users, desktop and corporate. I was not surprised by Redhat adopting it (it’s their own product) but Debian was quite the shock.

Yes systemd is definitely a step up from traditional initscripts (oh god). In terms of simplicity, reliability and ease of configuration however it’s a step below other options (like runit). I don’t have distro management experience but, given the problems I’ve encountered with different init systems over the years, I suspect there would be less of a maintenance burden with the other options.

I’ve been using PipeWire this year on my Void Linux laptop & desktop. It’s been mostly OK but has a few problems. For years I have been using plain ALSA (with no custom configuration) because pulseaudio causes me regular issues across multiple machines (mostly silently failing).

Pros:

• I don’t have to use Chromium for my mic to work on online video conf (WTF Firefox)
• “EasyEffects” lets me quickly fix crappy youtube audio (bad gain normalisation, way too much sibilance) with a minimum of effort.

Cons:

• Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
• First time setup is complicated, involving environment variables, dbus user session buses and multiple daemons (running just pipewire isn’t enough). Why can’t it handle this all itself? Surely it should notice if these things are missing and just fix it itself? Compare this to straight ALSA where you (1) do nothing and then (2) everything works (except Firefox mic support)
• I can’t have multiple audio outputs all unmuted at the same time. Eg my headphone output and my rear speaker output. If I override this (using alsamixer) then it gets forgotten next boot anyway, it seems to be out of scope of PipeWire’s understanding.

Can you describe the issue? I don’t use Discord (and I presume the problem might depend on what browser you use).

N.B. to anyone reading this: ask your isp to “opt out of CG-NAT”. Talking about IPv6 may confuse the staffer you’re talking to, it’s partially related but not the fully picture.