mrktf (u/mrktf) - Readit News

mrktf commented on Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor alexxcons.github.io/blogp... · Posted by u/pantalaimon

jchw · 18 days ago

Latency and throughput are very different things. However, it's worth noting that the comparison here is with and without compositing. If you were using compositing already on X11 (I believe XFCE offers it with "Desktop Effects" or something to that tune) then you've already been eating compositing latency, and you should actually get less latency in some situations.

But as far as it performing worse overall, I don't think that would be expected. Compositing itself does lean more on hardware acceleration to provide a good experience, though, so if you compare it on a machine that has no hardware accelerated graphics with compositing disabled, then it really would be worse, yeah.

mrktf · 18 days ago

Little misconception here (beware i'm using xlibre and causal user). On X11 you can find two mechanisms which can be called compositor :

1st: "enable display compositing" option - this one increases latency as every window draw need go though compositor application (in nutshell it exchanging opengl textures - only synchronization messages goes over "wire")

2nd: the Xserver rendering pipeline compositor, this one goes with modesetting (intel, amdgpu) driver TearFree option - almost everything inside X11 server in OpenGL textures and compositor perform direct blending to screen (including direct scanout).

What I want to tell, on modern X (there are merge requests for Xorg server to modesetting driver, amdgpu have this code) with TearFree enabled you by default optimal hardware acceleration - there comes lower latency

mrktf commented on Xfce is great rubenerd.com/xfce-is-grea... · Posted by u/mikece

margalabargala · a month ago

My newer desktop (2020 era with a 3070) has 4x 4k monitors attached running XFCE and I have never noticed the lag you speak of. I don't run external monitors on it but my thinkpad x200 with a core 2 duo also does great with xfce.

I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.

mrktf · a month ago

You shouldn't notice lag. On modern Xorg the only round-trip is context switches between server and compositor, because the only thing what is shared is texture dma-bufs (there is inefficiency in mesa code for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension, but it is other story). And if dma-bufs is working (Xorg needs to test and pull one MR) you have buffer direct scanouts as in wayland.

mrktf commented on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes reuters.com/world/us/us-w... · Posted by u/kpw94

bs7280 · a month ago

I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate.

If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the entire cost of the property to a bank in the form of interest payments.

Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.

mrktf · a month ago

With today requirements for accounting, somebody with economics background could tell what would be wrong with following solution?:

If you house owned by commercial entity - taxes are payed from full value, but the valuation to any collateral/derivative goes by something like (0.75x)^l, where l how many levels deep (counting ownership levels). For example it house is in some sort collateral/derivate/indirect ownership mix with 4 levels deep, it can only valuated as 0.31x value (you can only account as it is worth 1/3). In my mind it should reduce attractiveness for speculative buying.

mrktf commented on Enterprise security can be messy: Building a Security-Aware Culture · Posted by u/rezliant

necovek · 3 months ago

It happens because cybersecurity teams do not design for efficiency and believe that security trumps everything else. If they understood that security, just like anything else, is there to drive the business, they'd perhaps sit down with people doing the work. And then figure out how hard it is to share a simple file or a photo, take it to the print shop as one can't plug in their private USB stick, or how annoying it is to develop Linux IoT firmware on WSL, or how annoying it is to get logged out every 2h.

Because unless you do, people will adopt behaviour that makes them productive, and instead of increasing security, your policies will drive it down.

This is not a result of "bad employees": this is a result of bad security policies.

mrktf · 3 months ago

Yes, i couldn't agree more with this. The problem these "bad employees" earns wage by getting results and not entering multiple times mfa codes during day or repeating same logins. And talking from experience: these secure practices starting to approach at least hour of productive time everyday, which is literally robbing time

mrktf commented on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues cloudflarestatus.com/inci... · Posted by u/imdsm

powerpixel · 3 months ago

> here is no network protocol for a host to control traffic filtering on upstream providers (deny traffic from certain subnets or countries).

There is no network protocol per se, but there is commercial solutions like fortinet that can block countries iirc, but to note that it's only ip range based so it's not worth a lot

mrktf · 3 months ago

I think parent means: there no network protocol which can propagate blocking in sane manner between providers (something like bgp for firewalls)

edit: yes, you can you bgp to blockhole subnet traffic - the standard doesn't play well if you want blackhole unrelated subnets from upstream network

mrktf commented on X.org Security Advisory: multiple security issues X.Org X server and Xwayland lists.x.org/archives/xorg... · Posted by u/birdculture

jeroenhd · 3 months ago

There are plenty of setups where the X server runs at higher privileges/on a different host than the (partially trusted) application that might exploit the X server. This is a classic elevation of privileges vulnerability in those setups.

X11's practical absence of any security mechanisms for user sessions means you should probably not run any kind of low-trust UI program anyway, as there is no prevention of keystroke injection or screen recording, but that's a design flaw that will never be solved. That doesn't mean that EoP style attacks like these should be ignored or underestimated, though.

mrktf · 3 months ago

Digging deeper there are mechanisms for long time on internal X side (see https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/Xserv... ) - granted never seen it practically implemented.

And going to rabbit hole there are even proof of concept security implementation named Xnamespace for Xorg fork (needs polishing and much more patches but looks doable. see wip documentation: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/X11Libre/xserver/d2b60a3d6... )

mrktf commented on AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS oneuptime.com/blog/post/2... · Posted by u/ndhandala

ghaff · 4 months ago

Working around official IT was certainly a significant factor early on. I'm less convinced it is nearly as big a driver (or a downside depending on your perspective) today.

mrktf · 4 months ago

It depends on organization size, just my anecdotal example, I would say the moment IT department becomes own island (for example: can totally ignore requests, with excuses staff overbooked/we need extra planning/6 months extra meetings. Or even worse - process request,but up to point where it can show for upper management and blame you for wasting resources) - you can go full cloud, at least there it is possible get something working in reasonable time.

mrktf commented on Ask HN: Our AWS account got compromised after their outage · Posted by u/kinj28

WesleyJohnson · 4 months ago

Our Alexa had a random person "drop in" yesterday. We could hear a child talking on the other end, but no idea who it was. It may just be a coincidence, but it's never happened before so it's easy to imagine it might be related to the AWS issues.

mrktf · 4 months ago

More on technical side I'm interesting what is plausible explanation for this type "glitches"?: it inconsistent backend router state between processing nodes, processing application restart and screw up in shared memory segment (i can imagine to decrease load times - use "persistent" shared memory block for outstanding data), or just plain hash table collision and lack of empty slots (i mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_collision).

mrktf commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro

babarjaana · 4 months ago

Dumb question but what's the difference between the two? If the underlying config is broken then DNS resolution would fail, and that's basically the only way resolution fails, no?

mrktf · 4 months ago

My speculation: 1st one - it just DNS fails and you can repeat later. second one - you need working DNS to update your DNS servers with new configuration endpoints where DynamoDB fetches its config (classical case of circular dependencies - i even managed get similar problem with two small dns servers...)

mrktf commented on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel lwn.net/Articles/1040120/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

akimbostrawman · 5 months ago

He justified breaking the guidelines to address critical issues. one can hope these kind of problems would not happen that frequently in a stable project, besides it is still experimental.

mrktf · 5 months ago

As for occasional follower, my opinion is that: Kent overdid with bending rules until Linus & co got fed up.