chameleon

We won’t know for sure what’s actually going on under the hood until the console is cracked wide open or there’s a devkit leak, but my speculative guess is that some details of the GPU are ‘emulated’/recompiled. PC AAA games tend to include lengthy shader pre-compilation wait times, console games don’t have that wait time because the shaders are pre-compiled by the developers when building the game, specifically for one piece of hardware. The games themselves then fully rely on those pre-compiled shaders. They’re going to need shaders that work with the Switch 2’s GPU, which is going to involve some kind of imperfect translation process.

AMD was able to design better hardware that works with older compiled shaders, as done in the PS5/Xbox Series (and Pro consoles). That’s not a super common feature, but I imagine that AMD is more motivated to keep Microsoft/Sony happy than Nvidia is to keep Nintendo happy. AMD’s graphics division might as well shut their doors if it wasn’t for the consoles, meanwhile Nvidia is raking in trillions from the AI boom and would rather forget about gaming.

You go to the settings and verify it. You don’t have to host anything, just verify that you own the domain via text file or DNS record and choose to set it as your handle. Bluesky’s ATProto has a couple extra layers of indirection and it’s very easy to get a custom handle as a result.

The downside of this setup is that running your own complete network is completely impossible. If you want to follow theonion.com, anyone can find did:plc:a4pqq234yw7fqbddawjo7y35 in the DNS without too much work. That’s the identifier for The Onion’s Bluesky account, and even if they swapped back to .bsky.social, that ID number would stay. But that DID tells you absolutely nothing about where the data is currently hosted.

So how do you figure that out? Well, you register it with https://plc.directory/ which is ran by Bluesky and cannot currently be replaced. There’s fancy cryptography involved that makes it hard for them to spoof data, but they are perfectly capable of simply not giving any data out for any given DID.

Dracut may have this functionality already built in via rd.luks.key, so a custom module would really only make sense if you’re trying to do more than that. You can probably get away with just using that if you just want it to work, but if you want to customize stuff:

I suspect your module is running well after the device is already supposed to be cryptsetup opened. The way the default crypt module handles it is by setting up udev configuration in a very early phase, and then having udev request the password a little bit later when it finds the device it’s trying to open, until all devices are ready. It’s a complex mechanism compared to Alpine’s straightforward script, but it’s much more flexible when it comes to ordering of things like RAID/network devices/LUKS/etc.

The result of that is that your code would have to run much earlier. There’s some documentation on how hooks work, and the builtin rd.luks.key / keydev handler runs at cmdline 10. That’s well before your pre-mount, and probably where you’d want to run your code. Based on a cursory inspection of the other code, you could either cryptsetup open it yourself if you use the name it expects (rd.luks.name= cmdline parameter or luks-$luks_container_uuid), or you could use that /tmp/luks.keys mechanism (it’s a dracut-internal thing so you won’t find much documentation, but it lives in crypt-lib.sh, cryptroot-ask.sh and probe-keydev.sh).

As for debugging, the cmdline manpage has a few decent enough options. rd.break=cmdline or similar can force a shell before Dracut goes through a specific phase of hooks. You should be able to manually test doing things similar to your script at that point.

You’d be looking for /usr/share/mkinitfs/initramfs-init . I’ve never customized that myself, but it looks like there’s already some support for a keyfile if you look for KOPT_cryptroot and check that block of code. That looks like it’s mostly set up for a keyfile embedded into the initramfs, but I guess it should be possible to replace that code with something that grabs the keyfile off an USB drive.

I suppose you’d make a copy of it, put it somewhere in /etc or whatever and change the mkinitfs.conf to point to it. init="/etc/whatever/myinitramfs-init" should do the trick since the config file just gets sourced in. That said you’re definitively heading into unknown territory here. It might be easier to just use Dracut or the like instead.

mkinitfs doesn’t support running custom shell hooks. mkinitfs is very, very, very bare-bones custom code and the whole features concept exists only to pull extra files and kernel modules into the initramfs, not for extra logic.

You’d either have to customize the init script itself (not impossible, it’s 1000 lines) and pass -i/set init= in the .conf, or install Dracut/Booster instead (which should “just work” if you apk add them, but I’ve had no need to do so).

All of the cool development-related Nix things like pinning a project to known-good library versions (for regression tests or otherwise) don’t really need you to run NixOS. If you like NixOS then it’s a perfectly usable distro for development work, but all of the powers come from Nix itself, and that can be installed anywhere you feel comfortable with.

The only real pro of running full NixOS is that everything you work on will test a relatively uncommon *nix setup by its nature. Things like developer-only scripts with hardcoded #!/bin/bash shebangs are more likely to break on NixOS than they would on a conventional Linux distro with Nix installed. That’s something potentially worth fixing as it might also hurt the developer experience on *BSD/Mac systems.

That already happens constantly and I’d consider this the consequence of it, rather than the cause. You can only issue so many vetoes before people no longer want to deal with you and would rather move on.

The recent week of Wayland news (including the proposal from a few hours ago to restate NACK policies) is starting to feel like the final attempt to right things before a hard fork of Wayland. I’ve been following wayland-protocols/devel/etc from the outside for a year or two and the vibes have been trending that way for a while.

I’ll freely admit I don’t use that thing and was under the assumption it was feature complete. Regardless, the Android and iOS clients are also open, and I’ve found absolutely no indications that there’s any blobs in the repo or the like.

It’s not and I’m not sure how that article arrived at that conclusion. Their E2EE crypto is problematic homebrew crypto, but that’s very, very different from being closed. The whole desktop client including the implementation of that crypto is fully open source and lives right on GitHub. Plenty of people have independently reviewed it and came back with a very iffy impression of the whole thing.

Really the only difference is that Telegram doesn’t publish their backend, but the one Signal publishes is missing a couple of bits related to their “spam filter”, which happens to take in the source & destination of messages and do anything it wants with them. That doesn’t matter for either platform’s E2EE properties in any case, since distrusting the server is the whole point of E2EE.

Digging into the GitLab & related discussions, the main takeaway I got is that FFmpeg’s API supposedly meshes better with what Wine needs to provide to Windows code, simplifying things overall. GST is pretty heavy on asynchronous/background processing, which is normally something I’d consider good for media, but if the API you’re expected to implement is synchronous then I guess it only adds complexity.

Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).

Most paid certs aren’t worth much anyway. Payment and delivery info for DV certs isn’t validated by anyone, it’s literally the same concept as Let’s Encrypt. OV and EV are the only ones that theoretically have any value, but nobody is using those ever since they got rid of the URL bar labeling; even Amazon is on DV nowadays.

It depends on if you can feasibly implement compatibility layers for large parts of the “required” but very work-intensive drivers. FreeBSD has the same driver struggles and ended up with LinuxKPI to support AMD/Intel GPUs. I know there’s a whole bunch of toy kernels that implemented compatibility layers for parts of Linux in some fashion too.

It’s a ton of work overall but there’s room to lift enough already existing stuff from Linux to get the ball rolling.

In my experience, most hangs with a message about amdgpu loading on screen are caused by an amdgpu issue of some kind. I’d check to see if amdgpu ends up being loaded correctly via lsmod | grep amdgpu and just a general journalctl -b 0 | grep amdgpu to see if there’s any obvious failures there. Chances are that even if it’s not amdgpu, the real failure is in the journal somewhere.

Could be a wrong setting of hardware.enableRedistributableFirmware (should be true) or the new-ish hardware.amdgpu.initrd.enable (can be either really but either true or false might be more or less reliable on your system).

Gonna add a dissenting “maybe but not really”. YT is really aggressive on this kinda stuff lately and the situation is changing month by month. YT has multiple ways of flagging your IP as potentially problematic and as soon as you get flagged you’re going to end up having to run quite an annoying mess of scripts that may or may not last in the long term. There’s some instructions in a stickied issue on the Invidious repo.

Looking at the slides in the original Japanese source, this tooling also has a whole lot of analysis options and can pull/push game data/positioning both to and from a real Switch or something along those lines. Integrating that much custom features into an off-the-shelf tool would probably take just as long.

Did a physical-to-virtual-to-physical conversion to upgrade and unbreak a webserver that had been messed up by simultaneously installing packages from Debian and Ubuntu.

It’s a problem in the Secure Boot chain, every system is affected by any vulnerability in any past, present or future bootloader that that system currently trusts. Even if it’s an OS you aren’t using, an attacker could “just” install that vulnerable bootloader.

That said, MS had also been patching their own CVE-2023-24932 / CVE-2024-38058, and disabled the fix for that in this update due to widespread issues with it. I don’t think anyone knows what they’re doing anymore.

My dotfiles aren’t distro-specific because they’re symlinks into a git repo (or tarball) + a homegrown shell script to make them, and that’s about the end of it.

My NixOS configuration is split between must-have CLI tools/nice-to-have CLI tools/hardware-related CLI tools/GUI tools and functions as a suitable reference for non-Nix distros, even having a few comments on what the package names are elsewhere, but installation is ultimately still manual.

https://bagder.github.io/emails/ has the email collection.