Readit NewsDeleted Comment
LLVM's optimization passes also are less useful than you might think, since the vast majority of them is motivated by source->binary translation (like clang). They don't have much effect when recompiling an already optimized binary to another architecture.
The wiki rightfully points towards "roots", i.e. references produced by nix-build or similar. Additionally, there are other places that will keep references and hence block garbage collection though:
1. Your nix profile (`nix profile list` / `nix profile remove`) and its old generations (`nix profile (wipe-)history`)
2. Your NixOS configuration (configuration.nix) and its old generations (`nixos-rebuild list-generations`)
It doesn't help that there's no discoverable way to tell why a particular nix store path is not being garbage collected either.
Complexity referred to large code base and attack surface.
I haven’t tried it myself. I would be interested knowing, whether it might lower the security in some cases. Maybe it’s useful to sandbox apps that don’t have flatpaks.
Still, it can happen of course, particularly with memory-unsafe languages. Conversely without root privileges you have to sacrifice strength of your sandbox, widening the vulnerability window in the app you were trying to constrain to begin with.
Meanwhile bubblewrap relies on user namespaces, which come with their own set of security problems. They are disabled by default in many distributions for that reason.
How confident are you in this statement? I have no particular knowledge of Asahi. But I do know this narrative emerged about Rust-for-Linux after a couple of high-profile individuals quit.
In that case it was plainly bogus but this was only obvious if you were somewhat adjacent to the relevant community. So now I'm curious if it could be the same thing.
(Hopefully by now it's clear to everyone that R4L is a healthy project, since the official announcement that Rust is no longer "experimental" in the kernel tree).
I know Asahi is a much smaller project than R4L so it's naturally at higher risk of losing momentum.
I would really love Asahi to succeed. I recently bought a Framework and, while I am pretty happy with it in isolation... when I use my partner's M4 Macbook Air I just think... damn. The quality of this thing is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. And it doesn't even cost more than the competition. If you could run Linux on it, it would be completely insane to use anything else.
Most of current development is focused on reducing that pile to zero to get things into a tractable state again. So things continue to be active, but the progress has become much less visible.