Feed digilinux.ru [copy] http://digilinux.ru/feed/ has loading error: cURL error 22: The requested URL returned error: 403 Forbidden
Feed freepost [copy] https://freepo.st/rss/new has loading error: cURL error 6: Could not resolve host: freepo.st
State of Sway April 2017
Development on Sway continues. I thought we would have slowed down a lot more by now, but every release still comes with new features - Sway 0.12 added redshift support and binary space partitioning layouts. Sway 0.13.0 is coming soon and includes, among other things, nvidia proprietary driver support. We already have some interesting features slated for Sway 0.14.0, too!
Today Sway has 21,446 lines of C (and 4,261 lines of header files) written by 81 authors across 2,263 commits. These were written through 653 pull requests and 529 issues. Sway packages are available today in the official repos of pretty much every distribution except for Debian derivatives,...
MSG_PEEK is pretty common, CVE-2016-10229 is worse than you think
I heard about CVE-2016-10229 earlier today. In a nutshell, it allows for arbitrary code execution via UDP traffic if userspace programs are using MSG_PEEK in their recv calls. I quickly updated my kernels and rebooted any boxes where necessary, but when I read the discussions on this matter I saw people downplaying this issue by claiming MSG_PEEK is an obscure feature.
I don’t want to be a fear monger and I’m by no means a security expert but I suspect that this is a deeply incorrect conclusion. If I understand this vulnerability right you need to drop everything and update any servers running a kernel <4.5 immediately. MSG_PEEK allows...
2017-03-28
surf now uses webkit2 by default. The webkit1 version is kept in the surf-webkit1 branch. The “master” branch doesn't exist anymore, HEAD is now surf-webkit2, so be sure to rebase your local master commits onto surf-webkit1.
Principles for C programming
In the words of Doug Gwyn, “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things”. C is a very powerful tool, but it is to be used with care and discipline. Learning this discipline is well worth the effort, because C is one of the best programming languages ever made. A disciplined C programmer will…
Prefer maintainability. Do not be clever where cleverness is not required. Instead, seek out the simplest and most understandable solution that meets the requirements. Most concerns, including performance, are secondary to maintainability. You should have a performance budget for your code,...
Compiler devnotes: Machine specs
I have a number of long-term projects that I plan for on long timelines, on the order of decades or more. One of these projects is cozy, a C toolchain. I haven’t talked about this project in public before, so I’ll start by introducing you to the project. The main C toolchains in the “actually usable” category are GNU and LLVM, but I’m satisfied with neither and I want to build my own toolchain. I see no reason why compilers should be deep magic. Here are my goals for cozy:
Self hosting and written in C An easy to grok codebase and internal design Focused on C. No built-in...Handling a queue of GPU jobs without resource manager
How do you execute a lot of experiments? Say you want to run as many as you can over night, and examine them in the morning. The jobs can be executed one after the other as easy as bash run.sh when you have a single GPU. The problems arise when you have more than one so you want to make sure each GPU is occupied with exactly one task at a time and new task is fetched when previous finished. A clever way would be to use a resource manager such as slurm or torque, but I leave it as...
Lessons to learn from C
C is my favorite language, though I acknowledge that it has its warts. I’ve tried looking at languages people hope will replace C (Rust, Go, etc), and though they’ve improved on some things they won’t be supplanting C in my life any time soon. I’ll share with you what makes C a great language to me. Take some of these things as inspiration for the next C replacement you write.
First of all, it’s important to note that I’m talking about the language, not its standard library. The C standard library isn’t awful, but it certainly leaves a lot to be desired. I also want to place...
The only problem with Python 3's str is that you don't grok it
I’ve found myself explaining Python 3’s str to people online more and more often lately. There’s this ridiculous claim about that Python 3’s string handling is broken or somehow worse than Python 2, and today I intend to put that myth to rest. Python 2 strings are broken, and Python 3 strings are sane. The only problem is that you don’t grok strings.
The basic problem many people seem to have with Python 3’s strings arises when they write code that treats bytes like a string, because that’s how it was in Python 2. Let me make this as clear as possible:
a bytes is not a...