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αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

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Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#271

Post by ComputerGuru »

ChrisSD wrote: post #244
ant6n wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought windows runs on anything which supports extensions up to sse2, which is what amd64 includes.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min... Devices that run Windows 10 for desktop editions require a 1 GHz or faster processor or SoC that meets the following requirements: * Compatible with the x86* or x64 instruction set. * Supports PAE, NX and SSE2. * Supports CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, and PrefetchW for 64-bit OS installation

The PAE and NX requirements can be disabled in the bootloader.

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#272

Post by ComputerGuru »

ant6n wrote: post #262
ChrisSD wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min... Devices that run Windows 10 for desktop editions require a 1 GHz or faster processor or SoC that meets the following requirements: * Compatible with the x86* or x64 instruction set. * Supports PAE, NX and SSE2. * Supports CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, and PrefetchW for 64-bit OS installation

Mmmh, so it seems one would be stuck on win 8.0 (for 64bit) with an original implementation of amd64. Could probably still run a lot of new software.

Or run 32-bit Windows 10 instead.

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#273

Post by jart »

user5994461 wrote: post #86
ChrisSD wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The Win32 API (and UWP et al) is the only one that's officially stable. Kernel syscalls themselves are entirely unstable. Not even just the numbers but the calling convention and everything else. Microsoft reserves the right to add, remove or modify anything in or exposed by the NT kernel. Of course they won't do so frivolously but syscall numbers are especially prone to change with a new build of the kernel.…

I might not be following here. Windows kernel functions are those in ntdll.dll. They've been stable for a very long time as far as I am aware. Well, the 30% of them that are documented at least. It's used by drivers, antivirus and rootkits. C headers with the prototypes are available from the Windows Driver Development Kit. It's not something you want to use though, the average kernel function takes 10 arguments to s…

NTDLL is only stable if Microsoft likes what you're doing. For example, Microsoft culture is super biased against fork() or any creative use of virtual memory. There was, for decades, a sort of a hush hush fork() workaround in NTDLL that people thought was stable. Then some Sunnyvale startup called Crossmeta built a product to capitalize on it, Microsoft rolled out a security update, and poof it's gone. They ignored all the documented warnings saying "if you use NTDLL be sure to have fallback!" So think twice before messing with Redmond.

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#274

Post by [deleted] »

withinboredom wrote: post #257
elmo2you wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, I would argue, says at least as much about the HN crowd as it does about whoever posted the article under this specific title. EDIT: more specifically .. it's rather ironic how judgmental (and honestly: pretty darn pretentiously) so many here instantly get, yet how there is this implied assumption that the collective wisdom and judgement of this community is above criticism itself, somehow. It might say far mo…

FWIW, it's not annoying or upsetting to me. However, I took Russian years ago. The only thing I remember is the alphabet and some random words. I also live in a country where the language is not my native one. So, when I saw this in a language I may be able to pronounce like a 3 year old, my immediate response was to think "oh, let's see if I can guess what this says" into "wait what..." into "wtaf" into "oh, that's…

[deleted]

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#275

Post by danShumway »

nurettin wrote: post #85
axegon_ wrote: post #74

People... Please stop using foreign alphabets like that! It's a nightmare for those of us who know the alphabets. It took me a good 20 seconds to read the title. And it's magnitudes worse when someone uses cyrillic for instance and it's native to me.

Foreign alphabet transliteration drama thread under the best hacking-grade article in years. Thanks, hn.

IMO this is not in the same category as people complaining about a website requiring Javascript or using the wrong font. It's an unreadable title for screenreaders. And unlike Javascript or CSS styling or trackers, needing a screenreader is not a personal choice, or a limitation that people can turn on and off.

I think it's fair to point out when a good article makes itself inaccessible due to a trivially correctable problem.

I'm not even saying that the author can't make the joke they're trying to make, but even a small title change like "αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (actually portable executable)" would basically solve the entire problem without sacrificing any of the meaning behind what the author wants to convey with their misuse of Unicode.

It is a good article, which is why the pointless pushback over accessibility is so frustrating. There would be no engineering effort or large compromise required to make the title of the submission readable. It wouldn't suddenly make the article bad, or not worth reading. It feels like it's being exclusionary just for the sake of being exclusionary.

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#276

Post by jart »

sagebird wrote: post #247

What's the challenges involved in making a actually portable executable that is a compiler that can create actually portable executables. Why muck with getting a gcc running on windows or whatever if you don't have to? If you only mess with c once a year or so, getting compilers set up is a pain.

Right now I'm solving the problem by only doing my dev work on Linux. That works fine for me, since the output binaries run on other platforms too. But I'd love to support more flexibility for more people! Not everyone is accustomed to doing their coding via an SSH terminal. So the challenge is getting more eyeballs on the Cosmo source code so we can add features and iron out the long tail of bugs.

Earlier this year, I somehow managed to successfully compile an x86_64-linux-gnu toolchain under MinGW. Using that, pretty much 90% of the Cosmopolitan built fine under Windows without needing a Linux VM (which actually goes faster than native WIN32 due to how Make+GCC assumes processes work). I've tried and failed several times to compile GCC from source on Mac.

But I think compiling GCC is just so hard, that I'd probably rather embed the GNU/Linux compiler binaries in the PKZIP embedded file structure of EMULATOR.COM, since that should create a GPL boundary that's kosher per the GPLv3 and GCC RTEv3 terms.

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#277

Post by saagarjha »

2bitencryption wrote: post #268
jart wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I considered doing that. Then I learned about things like how MSVC 2017 would wrap the main() function of C programs with telemetry. The push for code signing, retpoline, aslr, etc. worries me too, from a software freedom standpoint, and the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake…

> The printf statement in the header will overwrite the first 64-bytes of the executable, the first time it's invoked Is this a problem for anti-virus/other security measures? My understanding is, executables that manipulate themselves is something any security software will look for. Though perhaps the answer is "don't rely upon security software to police your system; do it yourself"

Generally executables like to rewrite themselves while in RAM; rewriting on disk is rarer (since you leave behind the changes you made).

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#278

Post by saagarjha »

jart wrote: post #259
marcan_42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go tried to break the rules and call macOS syscalls directly (like they do on Linux, because Go is a massively NIH language so they don't use libc where they can get away with it) and it bit them hard when an OS update broke all Go apps.

If Apple broke every Go program, then that's on Apple. Why are people blaming the victim? Go didn't do anything wrong. Apple came back in the late nineties, in part, because they copied and pasted the magic numbers from the Bell System Five codebase, e.g. 1 for exit(), etc. Capitalizing on UNIX popularity helped Apple succeed. So they shouldn't treat Bell Labs technologies like it's their own implementation detail. F…

Are you familiar with Apple's concept of "private API"? Apple considers the list of exported symbols from a dynamic library to not be a boundary (in fact, they have a linker that ignores that and links against a predefined list of symbols regardless of what a binary exports), much less the kernel syscall interface. In fact, Apple silicon requires that your program is loaded by dyld as far as I can tell.

While I wan't around in the nineties, I'm curious how syscall numbering helped Apple's success. I'm sure System-V ABI when they switched to 64-bit Intel was probably a nice bonus, but system call numbers?

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#279

Post by throwaway894345 »

jart wrote: post #211
modeless wrote: post #16

I believe that scripts without a shebang line cannot be executed by execve. They will only run if the shell sees them before the kernel does. It's an annoying limitation of this approach and it wasn't clear to me whether this technique includes a workaround for this. Also the push for code signing everywhere is going to make this harder in the future as well. (I heard a rumor that the workaround to run unsigned execu…

Author here. I considered doing that. Then I learned about things like how MSVC 2017 would wrap the main() function of C programs with telemetry. The push for code signing, retpoline, aslr, etc. worries me too, from a software freedom standpoint, and the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake…

> the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake, ninja, gin, etc.

What's the issue specifically? I've never had a good Autotools experience (granted, I wouldn't reach for Bazel or CMake either--the whole build tool ecosystem is in desperate need of innovation IMO and probably the nicest things are Nix or Guix).

Re: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

#280

Post by mastazi »

StavrosK wrote: post #132
mastazi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"actmally rdrtable execmtable" that's more or less how it reads to someone who knows the Greek alphabet :-D (I might be partially wrong because I've studied Greek many years ago and my memory is not good)

That's an English p, not a Greek ρ.

you are right, I assumed it was a rho but on closer inspection it's a lowercase p
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