Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux 7.2

igalia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 141 posts

Re: Linux 7.2

#131

Post by win311fwg »

fallingbananna wrote: post #120
ColdStream wrote: post #71

It is funny with Linux (the kernel). From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes. You switch the computer on, it works away in the background to bring up the desktop and have everything talk. From that perspective it feels like nothing has changed in decades. But then you look at the change log, and almost everything you see added sounds really useful to someone working on this stuff. 35 years of work…

Isn't this the case with most well established software? There is still a lot of work done on the background, perhaps even more than ever. But unless you are a power user eagerly waiting for one of the things currently worked on, you wouldn't notice or care unless the interface changes (which usually only happens on visual interfaces).

Software with user interfaces will typically refresh the UI from time to time to remind you that its developers are still hip and with it.

But there isn't a whole lot a kernel can do in the same way. Hardware support is about as user-visible as things get for Linux.

Re: Linux 7.2

#132

Post by [deleted] »

ColdStream wrote: post #71

It is funny with Linux (the kernel). From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes. You switch the computer on, it works away in the background to bring up the desktop and have everything talk. From that perspective it feels like nothing has changed in decades. But then you look at the change log, and almost everything you see added sounds really useful to someone working on this stuff. 35 years of work…

[deleted]

Re: Linux 7.2

#133

Post by porridgeraisin »

Mond_ wrote: post #74
reisse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over. All these things are visible across the…

I run Linux as my primary operating system and I have never even heard of eBPF! I'd be surprised if most end users have.

Well ya, it's more useful in observability usecases than desktop ones. But recently I've been using for a consumer desktop usecase. I made a file watcher with it. I'm sure you're familiar with the woes of using inotify/fanotify.

eBPF vfs hooks based watchers are really nice.

[edit] details

- you setup a single `mount` - this is the only part that requires cap_sys_admin - then you run a single daemon, this one only needs cap_bpf, and this runs once at startup and is its own self contained program - this daemon writes events into a ringbuf referred to by a file in that bpf mount - you then read that from your standard user program (this can be done by whichever application needs to consume the events)

the events are create, mkdir, delete. renames are automatically decomposed since we hook at the vfs layer. the hook itself is practically free to run and thus there is no question of a performance impact.

Re: Linux 7.2

#134

Post by NekkoDroid »

IshKebab wrote: post #116
throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered zram/swap? Since running it, i have never seen mem usage > 95%, even under absurd workloads and have never been oom-killed ever since.

I did try that back when I only had 32GB. They definitely helped (especially swap) but didn't completely eliminate the problem. I don't know how they do it but I've never had a single issue with OOMs on Windows or Mac. I know Windows doesn't overcommit and it has a proper ctrl-alt-del to let you actually control killing processes if you need to... I'm not sure what Mac does.

Every time I OOM on Windows my Laptop just becomes completely unresponsive excluding the hardware cursor (it is the only thing still movable, everything else is frozen in time), ctrl-alt-del does fuck all until the system becomes responsive again. The worst part is, this isn't limited to OOM, but generally when my disk is hammered with high I/O (e.g. caused by thrashing).

Re: Linux 7.2

#135

Post by hdjrudni »

reisse wrote: post #73
ColdStream wrote: post #71

It is funny with Linux (the kernel). From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes. You switch the computer on, it works away in the background to bring up the desktop and have everything talk. From that perspective it feels like nothing has changed in decades. But then you look at the change log, and almost everything you see added sounds really useful to someone working on this stuff. 35 years of work…

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over. All these things are visible across the…

> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever

Didn't know that. Is it worth looking into over ZFS?

Re: Linux 7.2

#136

Post by wormius »

hdjrudni wrote: post #135
reisse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over. All these things are visible across the…

> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever Didn't know that. Is it worth looking into over ZFS?

For desktop I think it would be fine, though if you have the advanced needs of all the ZFS features I would stick with ZFS, but I had no problem.

The real problem I had was a low limit to save history. I install a lot of software, Cachy would run the snapshot every time (good), but it only kept like 5-10. And the one I needed to restore to was further back (I can't remember the exact issue), but that was more the defaults of how cachy set it up, and my use case than btrfs/snapper itself.

Whatever tool you use to snapshot btrfs, you may wish to have a custom number of saves if you install tons of software a lot...so you can avoid having too few backups available from the boot menu. I'm sure there was a way around it but I said f it and just reinstalled instead of trying to look up on my crap tablet how to get at the old files (assuming they were still there and just not accessible from the boot menu vs being completely erased).

I do not think it was btrfs that broke, to be clear.

This was like a week before the big hack on AUR, so I wonder if I got hit by a supply attack, but it was pretty shoddy, and broke my system, thus my reinstall saved me from (possibly) a lot more pain down the road.

Re: Linux 7.2

#137

Post by sscaryterry »

bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #86
ColdStream wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using Linux on the desktop since the late 90's. Other than increase hardware support, I have not tangentially noticed/felt almost anything you have mentioned here. When I fire up the desktop and load Firefox, I do not feel or see the sandboxing, the scheduler, the file system or the I/O. It just works. Yes, we interact with it all the time but it isn't something that the end user would notice and that is…

I also have been using Linux for over 20 years and I agree that hardware support is the most noticable. This year I have installed Linux Mint on computers from people who wanted to jump from Windows to Linux. Every time I booted via USB, installed Linux and 10 minutes later everything was working. This would not have happened 10 years ago. Back then there would always be an issue with a video driver, WiFi driver or a…

The most fun I ever had with a computer was as a 17-year old, installing gentoo on a P4 machine, over dialup, stage 2 tarball, custom kernel.

Re: Linux 7.2

#138

Post by stusmall »

Mond_ wrote: post #74
reisse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over. All these things are visible across the…

I run Linux as my primary operating system and I have never even heard of eBPF! I'd be surprised if most end users have.

You may know more about what it powers. It has enabled much faster, higher quality, more stable security software on Linux. Many modern security tools are built on top of it. While end users might not know it by name, it has made Linux easier to support in the enterprise.

Re: Linux 7.2

#139

Post by doubled112 »

truncate wrote: post #75
Mond_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Linux as my primary operating system and I have never even heard of eBPF! I'd be surprised if most end users have.

Seems like parent thread spoke from perspective of developer/tech savvy person. But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming mac…

[dead]

Re: Linux 7.2

#140

Post by isityettime »

ColdStream wrote: post #71

It is funny with Linux (the kernel). From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes. You switch the computer on, it works away in the background to bring up the desktop and have everything talk. From that perspective it feels like nothing has changed in decades. But then you look at the change log, and almost everything you see added sounds really useful to someone working on this stuff. 35 years of work…

I imagine for some end users a lot of this stuff is happily invisible, just like you say.

But for me, a few kinds of changes have been highly visible as a user:

  - basically all filesystem changes, especially the mainstreaming of copy-on-write filesystems
    - not a change, but dramatically better filesystems performance than Windows or macOS has always been noticeable
  - the addition of cgroups and cgroupsv2, and later user namespaces, which enabled lots of software that I use
  - all kinds of driver updates and additions, obviously
  - newer virtual filesystem stuff for introspection, set to replace /proc
  - addition of KVM! I remember when this was not a given, in the Xen days
As someone who uses macOS at work for the last several years, I really miss the Linux kernel when it comes to filesystems, and feel like macOS updates often involve very few changes that I care about or even consider operating system change at all. Most macOS updates are just trumped up application updates.

In that way I've kind of felt the opposite somehow, like OS updates on proprietary operating systems feel thin and empty.

Post reply on HN