slavik81 (u/slavik81)

slavik81 commented on AMD GPU Debugger thegeeko.me/blog/amd-gpu-... · Posted by u/ibobev

c2h5oh · 7 days ago

GDB supports it https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/AMD-G...

You also get UMR from AMD https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tomstdenis/umr

There is also a bunch of other tools provided: https://gpuopen.com/radeon-gpu-detective/ https://gpuopen.com/news/introducing-radeon-developer-tool-s...

slavik81 · 7 days ago

It's worth noting that upstream gdb (and clang) are somewhat limited in GPU debugging support because they only use (and emit) standardized DWARF debug information. The DWARF standard will need updates before gdb and clang can reach parity with the AMD forks, rocgdb and amdclang, in terms of debugging support. It's nothing fundamental, but the AMD forks use experimental DWARF features and the upstream projects do not.

It's a little out of date now, but Lance Six had a presentation about the state of AMD GPU debugging in upstream gdb at FOSDEM 2024. https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-20...

slavik81 commented on The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude blog.chrislewis.au/the-un... · Posted by u/knackers

simonw · 9 days ago

For anyone else who was initially confused by this, useful context is that Snowboard Kids 2 is an N64 game.

I also wasn't familiar with this terminology:

> You hand it a function; it tries to match it, and you move on.

In decompilation "matching" means you found a function block in the machine code, wrote some C, then confirmed that the C produces the exact same binary machine code once it is compiled.

The author's previous post explains this all in a bunch more detail: https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-...

slavik81 · 8 days ago

Snowboard Kids 2 was a great N64 game. It was one of a number of racing titles inspired by Mario Kart, but the snowboarding added a bit of a different feel. The battle items were clever, and the stages were really well made given the technical limitations they faced. As a kid with two brothers, we played a lot of competitive multiplayer.

I also remember a few things in the singleplayer being very difficult. The number of times I had to fight/race Dameian in his giant robot running down the mountainside... It's carved into my brain like that footrace against Wizpig in DKR or the Donkey Kong arcade game for the Rareware coin in DK64.

The battle items in Snowboard Kids were clever and memorable. The parachute missile that would launch racers up in the air and then deploy the parachute so they slowly float back down was such a frustrating item to be hit with. The pans that would hit all opponents was iconic and it was hilarious that you could somehow doge it with invisibility. Even the basic rock dropped on the course was somehow memorable.

Great game. It's heartwarming to know that others still remember it and care about it.

slavik81 commented on Why don't people return their shopping carts? behavioralscientist.org/w... · Posted by u/ohjeez

JohnBooty · a month ago

    It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as 
    far as it comes to participating in a high trust 
    society.

Here's an even better test, if you ask me.

Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter)

Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day.

Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.

slavik81 · a month ago

> Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.

slavik81 commented on USA gives South Korea green light to build nuclear submarines navalnews.com/naval-news/... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

nobodyandproud · a month ago

How do they achieve it? The cost of living and social services can’t be that much different from at least mid-tier EU members.

slavik81 · a month ago

The Korean War played a major part, according to "Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore". https://youtu.be/0Gk61ginOqo

slavik81 commented on HipKittens: Fast and furious AMD kernels hazyresearch.stanford.edu... · Posted by u/dataminer

LtdJorge · a month ago

Ahh, composable-kernel. The highest offender in the list of software that have produced unrecoverable OOMs in my Gentoo system (it’s actually Clang while compiling CK, which uses upwards of 2.5GB per thread).

slavik81 · a month ago

I was recently reviewing a CK package for Debian. My test build crashed due to OOM using -j32 on a 64GB workstation, so I tried with -j1 to be safe. That completed successfully after 190 hours!

I think I may need to reduce the number of architectures it's built for to successfully compile it on the official Debian buildd infrastructure, but my (unverified) understanding is that most of its reverse dependencies only need the header-only parts of the library anyway.

I'm told they're working on improving the build times via a few different methods.

slavik81 commented on HipKittens: Fast and furious AMD kernels hazyresearch.stanford.edu... · Posted by u/dataminer

JonChesterfield · a month ago

This doesn't sound right. I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

They've paid serious amounts in RSUs over the last six years. Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs. Bonus might be team dependent, I remember being annoyed and nicely surprised by it in different years.

The aql profiler confuses me quite a lot but it's definitely a tool for measuring performance.

slavik81 · a month ago

I don't think anon is correct, but I can understand how they'd come to their conclusions. I certainly didn't choose AMD to maximize my pay, though it's always been a comfortable salary.

With regards to performance, there are some things tracked carefully and other things that are not tracked at all. I suspect that is why some folks think we're really good at it and others think we're terrible. There's lots of room for improvement, though. Excitement over trivial performance regressions is more a sign of immaturity than of good tracking.

slavik81 commented on Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15 apnews.com/article/denmar... · Posted by u/c420

slavik81 · a month ago

Why was 15 chosen? I assume there's evidence that older children and adults are able to use social media responsibly and therefore not harmed?

slavik81 commented on US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety yahoo.com/news/articles/u... · Posted by u/gmays

ninalanyon · 2 months ago

Is it really such an imposition to simply drive at the posted limit at all times when passing a school? It only takes a few seconds even if you slow to a crawl.

slavik81 · a month ago

While I had been describing the provincial rules, what you're describing is how it works in my particular city. They passed a municipal bylaw that makes all school zones and playground zones active every day from 7am to 9pm. I was strongly supportive of that change.

slavik81 commented on Introducing architecture variants discourse.ubuntu.com/t/in... · Posted by u/jnsgruk

Amadiro · a month ago

It's also because around 20 years ago there was a "reset" when we switched from x86 to x86_64. When AMD introduced x86_64, it made a bunch of the previously optional extension (SSE up to a certain version etc) a mandatory part of x86_64. Gentoo systems could already be optimized before on x86 using those instructions, but now (2004ish) every system using x86_64 was automatically always taking full advantage of all of these instructions*.

Since then we've slowly started accumulating optional extensions again; newer SSE versions, AVX, encryption and virtualization extensions, probably some more newfangled AI stuff I'm not on top of. So very slowly it might have started again to make sense for an approach like Gentoo to exist**.

* usual caveats apply; if the compiler can figure out that using the instruction is useful etc.

** but the same caveats as back then apply. A lot of software can't really take advantage of these new instructions, because newer instructions have been getting increasingly more use-case-specific; and applications that can greatly benefit from them will already have alternative code-pathes to take advantage of them anyway. Also a lot of the stuff happening in hardware acceleration has moved to GPUs, which have a feature discovery process independent of CPU instruction set anyway.

slavik81 · a month ago

The llama.cpp package on Debian and Ubuntu is also rather clever in that it's built for x86-64-v1, x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4. It benefits quite dramatically from using the newest instructions, but the library doesn't have dynamic instruction selection itself. Instead, ld.so decides which version of libggml.so to load depending on your hardware capabilities.

slavik81 commented on US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety yahoo.com/news/articles/u... · Posted by u/gmays

izacus · 2 months ago

Wait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?

slavik81 · 2 months ago

Yes, that's how it works in Alberta. It's particularly confusing because not all schools have the same academic calendar (e.g., most schools have a summer break, but a few have summer classes).

Unlike the sibling comment, there are no lights or indications of when school is in session. You must memorize the academic calendar of every school you drive past in order to know the speed limit. In practice, this means being conservative and driving more slowly in unfamiliar areas.