• 7 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Confused about linux as alwaysEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago
    You can technically do anything with anything. My saying that is dumb though. I'm not telling you the scope of intelligence involved.

    Linux is the kernel. The kernel is something most users rarely interact with or understand. The kernel is basically interfacing with your hardware specifically and then creating an applications interface that all software can interact with.

    So let’s say your computer has a small auxiliary board inside that your USB ports are connected with. Your mouse is plugged into that USB port. The auxiliary board has this random Infinion chip that creates the USB hub. The kernel’s job is to figure out how to use that Infinion chip and make a connection that is the same for all software to interface with. Your office suite or internet browser never needs to know how to interface with that infinion chip or any other specific hardware.

    Windows has a micro kernel architecture. They publish a static spec for hardware manufacturers to write their own drivers for and the user must find and add them manually.

    Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture. All kernel modules (drivers-ish) are included in the kernel itself and maintained by the community. The vast majority of hardware issues that happen in Linux are due to undocumented hardware; meaning there are no datasheets describing how the device works or how to program it. Undocumented hardware is due to seedy companies stealing IP and trying to hide it, and manipulating the market in an attempt to steal ownership from the end consumer while profiting from stagnation by selling old products while they lack engineering innovation and competitiveness in an open market. Soapbox over. The wonderful folks over at Debian are the ones that reverse engineer a lot of this stuff and make it work with Linux regardless of documentation.

    Anyways, the Linux kernel is just part of the puzzle here. You can configure and compile your own custom kernel. Gentoo makes that quite easy to do for advanced users. Fedora has a nice guide I saw recently as well.

    All CS students learn how operating systems work using Linux. There are lots of people who make their career in parts of Linux.

    By itself Linux is basically just a terminal/command line. All the pretty graphics stuff requires other stuff like a DE.

    The issue of initial scope complexity that you’re facing is really common. All of the distros have a purpose. They are not just branding or team sports. All of these distros are made by packagers that each have their own methodologies and preferences. Most of these differences can create compatibility issues, especially if you do not understand them. However, all of the packagers are building on top of a similar base of software.

    When some one says you can just swap this or that outside of the packages configured by the distro maintainers, they are implying you have the same experience and understanding about the distro configuration and packages as the maintainer and a full understanding of a POSIX system, or they are just a fool, or happened to have success after following someone’s tutorial one time in a virtual machine. Few general users keep updating stuff like this over time. They just switch to a prepackaged distro that has the DE they want. The exception to this rule are savant types or people with no life or peripheral interests. Most of these people gravitate to Arch (and talk about it too if they are trolls), or use Gentoo where everything you do is configurable and made to compile yourself easily. The epic route is to do a Linux From Scratch build.

    The best beginner’s route is to give up our ancient old mod a civic to pretend-street-race culture and just use the vanilla experience. Ubuntu is a lot less popular now. Fedora is the new Ubuntu, while Mint is the goto if you want a Debian derivative or to game. Fedora is pretty well dialed and handles secure boot well. SB is outside of the kernel, so is a thing that distro packagers either provide or don’t.

    KDE is kinda like Windows. Mint has KDE and Fedora ships a KDE version too. I recommend just doing gnome, it seems a little funny at first, but it is well designed and intuitive. There are some headaches in the learning curve but it is not hard IMO.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burstEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    Multi threading is parallelism and is poised to scale to a similar factor, the primary issue is simply getting tensors in and out of the ALU. Good enough is the engineering game. Having massive chunks of silicon laying around without use are a mach more serious problem. At the present, the choke point is not the parallelism of the math but actually the L2 to L1 bus width and cycle timing. The ALU can handle the issue. The AVX instruction set is capable of loading 512 bit wide words in a single instruction, the problem is just getting these in and out in larger volume.

    I speculate that the only reason this has not been done already is because pretty much because of the marketability of single thread speeds. Present thread speeds are insane and well into the radio realm of black magic bearded nude virgins wizardry. I don’t think it is possible to make these bus widths wider and maintain the thread speeds because it has too many LCR consequences. I mean, at around 5 GHz the concept of wire connections and gaps as insulators is a fallacy when capacitive coupling can make connections across all small gaps.

    Personally, I think this is a problem that will take on a whole new architectural solution. It is anyone’s game unlike any other time since the late 1970’s. It will likely be the beginning of the real RISC-V age and the death of x86. We are presently at the age of the 20+ thread CPU. If a redesign can make a 50-500 logical core CPU slower for single thread speeds but capable of all workloads, I think it will dominate easily. Choosing the appropriate CPU model will become much more relevant.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burstEnglish
    37·
    4 days ago

    Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

    Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

    Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. … IMO.

    Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don’t care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone’s legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.