enumerator4829

joined 2 months ago
[–] enumerator4829 5 points 7 hours ago

Please note that the nominal FLOP/s from both Nvidia and Huawei are kinda bullshit. What precision we run at greatly affect that number. Nvidias marketing nowadays refer to fp4 tensor operations. Traditionally, FLOP/s are measured with fp64 matrix-matrix multiplication. That’s a lot more bits per FLOP.

Also, that GPU-GPU bandwidth is kinda shit compared to Nvidias marketing numbers if I’m parsing correctly (NVLink is 18x 10GB/s links per GPU, big ’B’ in GB). I might read the numbers incorrectly, but anyway. How and if they manage multi-GPU cache coherency will be interesting to see. Nvidia and AMD both do (to varying degrees) have cache coherency in those settings. Developer experience matters…

Now, the real interesting thing is power draw, density and price. Power draw and price obviously influence TCO. On 7nm, I guess the power bill won’t be very fun to read, but that’s just a guess. The density influences network options - are DAC-cables viable at all, or is it (more expensive) optical all the way?

[–] enumerator4829 5 points 8 hours ago

There is actually less to ’xkill’. It nukes the X window from orbit in a very violent manner. The owning process(-tree) will usually just instantly curl up and die.

The main benefit is that it doesn’t actually kill the process, it only nukes the window. As such, you can get rid of windows belonging to otherwise unkillable processes (zombies, etc).

Also, it’s fun. Just don’t miss the window and accidentally kill your WM. (Beat that Wayland)

[–] enumerator4829 9 points 8 hours ago

Tony Stark was able to build his CA in a cave! With a bunch of dice!

[–] enumerator4829 36 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

This will be so much fun for people with legacy systems

[–] enumerator4829 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.

The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.

[–] enumerator4829 19 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.

  • No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
  • Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
  • ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
  • ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
  • I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
  • After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.

But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!

As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.

Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.

[–] enumerator4829 6 points 13 hours ago (11 children)

Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.

[–] enumerator4829 3 points 3 days ago

How about ”don’t”?

[–] enumerator4829 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Biomedical AI literally won the Nobel prize last year. But LLMs won’t help at all.

Tangentially related, any biomedical outfit that hasn’t bought a shitton of GPUs to run alphafold on is probably mismanaging money.

[–] enumerator4829 4 points 5 days ago

You have FreeIPA if you want a ”product”.

But honestly, if I, as a Linux admin, would do this kind of thing at this scale, I’d probably elect to remain on AD.

[–] enumerator4829 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here be dragons. But basically:

  • Run a VM from contents of a physical disk: use ’dd’ to create disk image. If on linux, try to boot and fix all the errors, hopefully few.

  • Run VM as physical machine: other way around.

You won’t find this in a tutorial. You need to understand concepts, read manuals, fit everything together, execute, fail and retry until it works.

For Windows, I have no idea. Conceptually, I figure it’s similar.

[–] enumerator4829 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You mean a transparency log? Just sign and publish. Or if it’s confidential, have a timestamp authority sign it, but what’s the point of a confidential blockchain? Sure, we han have a string of hashes chained together á la git, but that’s just an implementation detail. Where does the trust come from, who does the audit? That’s the interesting part.

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