Monthly Archives: March 2021

Armv9 introduced at Arm Vision Day 2021

Source: OSNews

Article note: Huh, I missed the SystemReady UEFI thing. The lack of any kind of standard boot environment on commodity ARM hardware has been a major problem. Like the article implies, UEFI would not have been my choice, but something standard is better than nothing.

ServeTheHome attended Arm Vision Day 2021 and posted a quick overview.

At the event, the company introduced Armv9 which will bring about key advancements for machine learning, digital signal processing, and security.

One of the key drivers of Arm expecting to see massive shipment growth is the need for specialized compute. Or another way to look at this is that a number of traditional analog devices will convert to some level of “smart” and connected over the next few years. An example was given of a mechanical pump (like a water pump) that could be monitored for failure signs and efficiency versus just pumping water. For each of those applications, there will be different needs in terms of sensor connectivity and processing, general-purpose and accelerated compute (CPU and AI as examples), memory, and communications infrastructure. Arm sees the lower power cost of new chips enabling a wider array of chips and therefore more chips being sold.

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Another key push will be for Arm SystemReady. This is building on Arm ServerReady which helped Arm servers go from being a science experiment to boot each server to our experience with the Ampere Altra Wiwynn Mt. Jade Server where it worked (mostly) out-of-the-box using a standard image.

Arm SystemReady is probably the biggest thing for OS enthusiasts. One of the weaknesses of the Arm hardware ecosystem, compared to the x86 ecosystem, is the lack of a standardized boot environment. x86 has a BIOS or UEFI, and Arm has UEFI (server) and something (probably devicetrees and a fork of Das U-Boot). Going forward Arm SystemReady systems will be able to boot via UEFI to allow for a standard OS image like x86.

They could have picked something else (coreboot, Barebox, Das U-Boot), but UEFI is at least better then what it was.

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Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade

Source: AnandTech Articles

Article note: Interesting. Calling it v9 seems like a little bit of a press-bump relative to the v7/v8 completely different architectures situation, but there are big changes. I'm suspicious of the variable-width vector engines that have been cropping up, but at first glance this looks more like first class partition-able SIMD than the silly expensive vector system the RISCV vector setup. Advanced hardware support for container isolation has been ...hit or miss... in the past, if they do a good job with it it should be really useful both for the hosted VM market and for isolating the many badly-behaved things that want to run on our pocket computers. If not it's going to be one of those architectural liabilities that's irritating to fix. Somehow I missed the tagged memory that came in in v8.5. Tagged architectures are always interesting, though this is a _very_ limited tagging setup that seems to just do reference liveness.

Today, as part of Arm’s Vision Day event, the company is announcing the first details of the company’s new Armv9 architecture, setting the foundation for what Arm hopes to be the computing platform for the next 300 billion chips in the next decade.

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The final official release of Classilla

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Bummer. An entirely reasonable decisions because supporting the modern web stack is unreasonable for...anyone on any platform... and a single volunteer with occasional help working on vintage machines is far from the ideal case. The fact that the modern web stack is that awful is a huge problem in general though. I don't know if it's simple complexity fetishism and not thinking interactions through, or actual malicious standards-engineering to benefit specific incumbents, but it's really, really unsustainable.
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68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Saw this burble up in retrocomputing-specific venues the other day, a more positive "Old computers and _the way_" note: Google News stripped such that Netscape1.1 running on a potato can render it. It still amazes me how changes to HTML that were supposed to lead to _less_ specifying presentation instead lead us into the absurdly brittle locked-in-presentation behavior of the modern web (never mind the _absurd_ runtime we've sprung, that makes the horrible old Java Applet system look like a reasonable behavior).
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A digital logic designer and circuit simulator

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ooh. I've made a lot of use of Logisim over the years and still regularly use Logisim-Evolution as an instructional too, nice to see something else in the space. Especially something that appears to have looked at some of the ugly in Logisim and is making serious efforts to avoid it.
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Religious fervour is migrating into politics

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've used the phrase "weird civic religions" for our cultural "teams" lately, and been yelled at by people who thinks it applies only to Q cultists and people who think it applies only to Wokeists alike. It's a real fuckin' problem.
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Google’s top security teams unilaterally shut down a counterterrorism operation

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Good. When someone gets caught actively exploiting a 0day against public targets, shut them down. I don't give a shit if it's a "friendly, democratic" nation-state actor, an "unfriendly" nation-state actor, a criminal organization, or some teenagers. They all look the same, and they all represent the same "Everyone watching now knows about this" secondary threat. There is nothing patriotic about colluding to hide attacks against the public. In the same way that crypto back-doors are bullshit that every bad actor will exploit against the public, magical tagging for "friendly" nation-state hackers is just an invitation for abuse and exploitation, and is the preamble for a stupid arms race legitimizing nation-state hackers fucking with the civilian populations of competing nations and selling backdoored shit into each others markets. Plus, we know the US intelligence community has long been operating without meaningful democratic oversight, so that's not an excuse either.
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RIP Google Reader

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Reader is the best-case scenario of internet socialization; filter-feeding (with filters and a schedule you controlled!) on neat stuff people put on the internet, seeing neat stuff your pool of people with shared interests found interesting, and discussing it with them. It obviously had to go because it wasn't usable as a tool of exploitation the way modern social media is. I moved to self-hosted tt-rss, and it's lovely (though the recent move to "Absurd overkill container orchestration is the only supported configuration" is ... not my favorite), but the barrier to entry is much too high for the good network effects Google Reader could bring to bear.
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Report: Microsoft in talks for $10 billion acquisition of Discord

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Microsoft's modern strategy seems heavily based on MITMing tools communities use to organize, with Linkedin, Github, Discord, etc. Microsoft would not be the worst-case for this since they mostly take care of the platforms they buy to MITM areas, but it's still a bit of a distasteful "4 companies own everything" situation.
Report: Microsoft in talks for $10 billion acquisition of Discord

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Microsoft is reportedly in the late stages of $10 billion acquisition talks with Discord, a gaming-focused community chat platform, according to unnamed "people familiar with the matter" who spoke to Bloomberg.

Epic Games and Amazon were also involved in acquisition talks previously, according to Bloomberg's sources. VentureBeat also reported this week that Discord is exploring sale options with "multiple parties."

First launched in 2015, Discord lets individual users create public or private servers that allow members to chat with others in that server via text, images, voice, and video livestreaming. The service now reportedly has 6.7 million such servers, which serve as centralized communication hubs for everything from official news and discussion from game publishers and multiplayer match organization among small groups of friends to a chaotic gathering place for people betting on the stock market—and everything in between.

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat! Nokia ended up with the old Plan9 IP when they absorbed Alcatel-Lucent, and are spinning a foundation to manage it and releasing pretty much everything under the MIT license, including the older versions that were never open. Plan9 is an artifact from an alternate universe, and it's good for your brain to play with.
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