August 2019 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

your desktop too boring? Rice it!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 20 Aug '19

20 Aug '19

<https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/> Personally, I like a boring desktop. I found this from a blog post: <https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/4/7_How_ricing_s…> This guy has a nice collection of old computers (in Cambridge, Ontario): <https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/retro_computing.html>

4 4

AMD firmware update removes PCI 4.0 support on some motherboards
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 19 Aug '19

19 Aug '19

One of the features of the latest round of Ryzen chips is support for PCI 4.0. In practice, PCI 4.0 isn't very important yet: current video cards don't saturate PCI 3.x and neither do NVMe SSDs. But NVMe SSDs that exploit PCI 4.0 are starting to be announced. There is a chicken and egg problem: until there are a lot of systems that can support PCI 4.0, few devices will be built to that spec. I was very disappointed to learn that AMD, in a firmware update, has disabled PCI 4.0 support for all consumer motherboards except those based on the very expensive x570 chipset. Their excuse was that some motherboards weren't built to reliably support PCI 4.0. Surely they could have left that up to the discretion of the MB manufacturer (through whom these firmware updates flow). The motherboard must be engineered for PCI 4.0. But it could be built with the cheaper X470, X370, B350, and A320 chips. No longer. <https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/buydi6/amds_robert_hallock_no_pcie_40…> <https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-pcie-4.0-socket-am4-motherboard,39559…>

2 1

Linux Kernel Allows 0.0.0.0/8 as a Valid Address Range
by James Knott 16 Aug '19

16 Aug '19

IPv6 has been around for years. Why don't some people get with the program, instead of coming up with hacks to get around the address shortage. Even with this block, there still won't be enough IPv4 addresses just for mobile devices, let alone everything else. The longer people take to move to IPv6, the worse the problem is going to get. By comparison, on IPv6, the smallest address block, /64 provides as many addresses as the entire IPv4 address space squared. I get 256 of those /64s from my ISP. Some ISPs provide 65K of them to each customer. Why are we wasting our time trying to squeeze more life out of something that should have been retired years ago? Incidentally, this block represents less than 0.4% of the IPv4 address space. Will it really make a difference? https://www.technotification.com/2019/08/linux-kernel-allows-0-0-0-0-8-as-a…

7 18

Nvidia Backends
by xerofoify 14 Aug '19

14 Aug '19

Greetings, For anyone on the list who is interested it seems that there is a backend targeting or compiling for Nvidia cards for programming in LLVM/GCC. Seems that its mainlined but CUDA is still closed source. https://llvm.org/docs/NVPTXUsage.html https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC Regards, Nick

1 0

[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting Tomorrow, Aug 13 at 7:30pm
by hi＠gtalug.org 13 Aug '19

13 Aug '19

<https://gtalug.org/meeting/2019-08/> # Lighting Talks Strike Twice. This is GTALUG's version of an un-conference, a loosely structured short talks emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured GTALUG meetings. If you already have a topic in mind please send an email speakers(a)gtalug.org to be added to the list of scheduled talks. If you would like to give a talk during the meeting, all you have to do is write your name on a post-it and stick it on the whiteboard in the front of the room. When your talk gets selected, you will have five to present your idea, then five minutes of audience questions. ### Scheduled Lightning talks * Pam and yubikey with Tomas Babej * Art and Open Source with Dan Tapper * Recent Developments in Open Source Assistive Technology with Stewart Russell * Scrapy with Elaine Wong * Jumping through the hoops towards GPU-accelerated computing with Alex Volkov * Our corporate (=tiny) Synology Data Centre with Ron Grimes ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <https://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <https://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

5 6

nvme SSD: critical medium error, dev nvme0n1
by Stewart C. Russell 11 Aug '19

11 Aug '19

I'm guessing this is bad, right? [Mon Jul 29 12:59:48 2019] print_req_error: critical medium error, dev nvme0n1, sector 296089600 flags 80700 [Mon Jul 29 12:59:48 2019] print_req_error: critical medium error, dev nvme0n1, sector 296089744 flags 0 Is it an oh-shit-get-yerself-a-new-drive-NOW thing, or …? Drive is a 2+ year old Intel 512 GB SSD. Not entirely sure what the right diagnostics are for SSDs. Filesystem is showing clean but touching certain known-bad files triggers the error in the system log. Dunno if these nvme stats are useful: Smart Log for NVME device:nvme0 namespace-id:ffffffff critical_warning : 0 temperature : 25 C available_spare : 85% available_spare_threshold : 10% percentage_used : 1% data_units_read : 10,349,479 data_units_written : 10,098,299 host_read_commands : 183,018,841 host_write_commands : 136,702,227 controller_busy_time : 1,342 power_cycles : 201 power_on_hours : 15,722 unsafe_shutdowns : 10 media_errors : 803 num_err_log_entries : 844 Warning Temperature Time : 0 Critical Composite Temperature Time : 0 Thermal Management T1 Trans Count : 0 Thermal Management T2 Trans Count : 0 Thermal Management T1 Total Time : 0 Thermal Management T2 Total Time : 0 Any suggestions, please, for: * what I should be looking for in stats (nvme smart-log-add doesn't give me anything at all, so no wear-levelling stats) * a decent brand to replace it with. I'm likely okay with a SATA SSD. cheers, Stewart

5 8

War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Aug '19

10 Aug '19

We bought two Asus ux305ca notebooks about three years ago. The Microsoft Store had a remarkably good deal on them. I'm not the only GTALUGger to buy this notebook. Two years ago one of the m.2 SATA SSDs suddenly stopped working. If I remember correctly, it didn't even show up as a disk. Last week the same thing happened on the second notebook. The only warning was that a few days earlier the firmware forgot what to boot. I easily fixed that by telling it again. This could easily have been a CMOS battery problem but I guess it wasn't. The computer acted as if the drive were not there. I installed it in a different machine and it was not detected in the other machine either. The firmware ("BIOS" is not the correct term) on both machines failed to see it. A live Fedora system (booted off a USB stick) failed to see it. It's dead, Jim. Lesson: SSDs don't give you warning about failures. Much worse (in my modest experience) than HDDs. Backup now. I'm skeptical about S.M.A.R.T. for SSDs. Inference: there may have been something wrong with the model of SSD used by Asus in the ux305ca. Two out of two failed us. Micron M600 256GB. I've had other SSDs fail, but only in the early days of SSDs. It's fairly easy to replace such a drive. You need to remove about a dozen screws and pry open the case. For the ux305ca you need a TORX T5 driver. For prying: use an old credit card, guitar pick, or spudger (don't use a screw driver since it may scratch or scar the case). Lesson: search YouTube for videos on taking apart you notebook. They are not perfect but they give you an idea of what you are in for. I'm actually doing musical chairs with SSDs. I have a spare NVMe SSD but the Asus can only take an m.2 SATA drive. I have a Dell notebook with an m.2 SATA drive but it can also support an NVMe drive. - broken m.2 SATA drive from Asus => ??? - m.2 SATA SSD from DELL notebook => Asus - new unused NVMe SSD => DELL notebook Background on SSD interfaces: First there were mSATA SSDs. Those were supported on some older machines (eg. ThinkPad T20 and T30 notebooks). Then came NGFF ("New Generation Form Factor") connectors and interfaces about the time of Haswell processors from Intel. They were quickly renamed to m.2 (because it rolls of the tongue, doesn't it?). Originally m.2 drives used the same SATA interface. Recently, the NVMe interface was added. It's just like PCIe on a different connector. That interface is much faster than SATA. It's so good that most new desktop motherboards support it -- it's not just for notebooks. I'm not sure when one would notice the speed difference between SATA and NVMe. SATA SSDs are already almost always a lot faster than HDDs. The first generation of NVMe SSDs had internal bottlenecks that may have limited the improvement over SATA.

13 48

interesting article and comments about UCS-16, UTF-16, UTF-8
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 06 Aug '19

06 Aug '19

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20600195 There are so many hairy details! UTF-8 gets a bit less coverage since it has fewer hairy details. >From this I learned that Java and JavaScript now have optimizations to use LATIN-1 when they can. Normally they use UTF-16 (originally UCS-16). I take it that Using Latin-1 is an opportunistic optimization hidden from the program. I don't think Python 3 uses this. I think that Linux does this right and needs no such hack: just use UTF-8. Of course Java, JavaScript, Python 2, and Python 3 on Linux don't get it right.

3 2

EOMA68
by Warren McPherson 06 Aug '19

06 Aug '19

Is anybody here familiar with the EOMA68 project.

5 5