unperson [he/him]

Huh, when I set it up zsmalloc wasn’t finished and never deallocated. But it seems that today it’s the right choice! Thanks.

am i right that you can create zswap block devices and mount them like with zram? (eg. mounting /var/tmp)

zswap is a “front swap”, it needs a backing swap to function that’s crucial to the design. It automtically goes in front of all the swaps you have enabled.

You could probably put the backing swap on a loop device on a tmpfs, but I don’t know how it will handle the loopback. It’s a better idea to put it on disk. It can be a slow or write-limited disk, it will not get used much. You definitely should not use zram and zswap at the same time.

excuse me the embargo has an exception for food and medicine

It’s really easy you see, you just need to pass an inspection and get a written permission from the President of the US, the payment must be made in cash in US dollars before shipment and through some non-American bank, and the shipping company must go straight from a US port to a Cuban port and back with no layovers.

This is not a joke, it’s what is actually written in the law.

Yes, more or less, they are closely related:

In regular swap, when you’re low on memory the kernel chooses some memory pages (low priority processes and least recently used) and writes them on disk on a file or partition. When the process that owns those pages need them back, the kernel goes fetch them one at a time. Since memory pages are 4KiB the speed on this depends on the 4k random access speed of your disk.

You can have more than one swap, and the order they are used depends on their priority, or on the order they were enabled in if you didn’t specify any priority.

zram is a kind of swap space that, instead of writing to disk, compresses the pages and writes them back in RAM. You set an uncompressed size for it and if the pages don’t compress well (usually encrypted on already-compressed data) then it will occupy the same amount of RAM. Since you can’t tell in advance what the compressed size will be and there’s no mechanism to stop it from filling up, you must be conservative on the size of zram. When the zram gets full all new pages will go to the next swap in priority order. This causes a problem where there’s old data you don’t care about taking RAM space in zram that cannot be reclaimed, and then your workload is going to regular swap which is slow.

zswap is a layer on top of swap, the technical name is “frontswap”. For it to work you need to already have a swap configured. Before memory pages are written down on the swap file, they are compressed, and if the compression ratio is good enough the pages go to RAM instead of to the swap file. You set a compressed size for the zswap (by default, 20% of your total RAM) and when this limit gets full the least recently used pages are written to disk. The compression is so fast that you barely notice a hiccup while it’s happening, it feels like you magically have 50% more RAM than before.

Answering your question, zswap is configured by kernel parameters, and now that you mention it it might work to put the parameters on the kernel cmdline instead of editing sysfs, this means configuring the boot loader and adding zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=lz4 zswap.zpool=z3fold to the kernel cmdline.

zswap has the same purpose than zram but a better design: it sends to disk the pages that cannot be compressed, and when it gets full it writes them back least recently used first. zram on the other hand keeps uncompressible pages around, and when it gets full all new pages go to disk and it makes the situation worse when you’re low on RAM.

The size is allright, but the zswap config is crucial.

I can’t figure out how to do it in guix with any certainty, perhaps you can enable it manually once to test and then research it better if you feel that it’s worth it. Like this, as root:

modprobe zswap
echo z3fold > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/zpool
echo lz4 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor
echo 1 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled
sysctl vm.swappiness=100

The 1 > enabled must be written after the other two. If you don’t have sysfs mounted at /sys, check with the mount command where it is.

A couple of mailing list threads that may help you do it “properly” in guix:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-02/msg00077.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-03/msg00332.html

Try this if you have low RAM, I lived with it for months when I had a broken DIMM and had to make do with 4 GB. The difference is incredible.

/etc/tmpfiles.d/zswap.conf

#Type Path                              Mode UID GID Age Argument
w /sys/module/zswap/parameters/zpool	- - - -	z3fold
w /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor	- - - - lz4
w /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled	- - - - 1

/etc/sysctl.d/00-swappiness.conf

vm.swappiness = 100

Depending on your workload you may increase swappiness to 200 with good results.

You need to set up some 8 GB of swap, it’s mostly for accounting purposes and will barely get used so it can be anywhere. If you already have zram, disable zram, it’s counter productive. Use the swapon command with no arguments to check if you have zram.

I like it because it’s designed. It think it’s the only DE with actual designers continuously working on it. It has few options and doesn’t feel hacked together.

When that eucharist looks moldy

> por ahí somos un poco pícaros, pecadores, pero el corazón es bueno

< YES, THERE ARE SOME ROGUES AND SINNERS, BUT THE HEART ITSELF IS GOOD

Give Yandex a try, it’s the only search engine where you can still just enter the keywords you think will be in the text you’re searching for and it gives you pages that contain those keywords you typed instead of feeding them into an incomprehensible language model trained to collect ad revenue.

I also find it’s a lot less censored for piracy than everything else.

I don’t know if this is because Yandex is tuned for the russian language, or if it really does work like they used to.

:dean-smile: I like the piracy comm and most of the db0 users I see coming here; they don’t deserve being thrown into the .world pit.

I find duolingo extremely effective for recognising and recalling vocabulary. If you complete a course you learn around 2000 words on context with sample sentences.

Vocabulary is tedious and maybe 1/4 of what goes into learning a language, so I’ll go against the common opinion and say it’s quite solid. But it does nothing for the other 3/4, you’ll never be able to think in Spanish, produce sentences, or understand when you’re spoken to with duolingo alone.

yay xfce sensors

3 aur/xfce4-sensors-plugin-nvidia-hddtemp_through_netcat-current 1.3.95-1 (+2 0.00) (Orphaned) 
    Sensors plugin for the Xfce panel with nvidia and hddtemp (through netcat) support
2 aur/xfce4-sensors-plugin-nvidia 1.4.4-2 (+26 0.00) 
    A lm_sensors plugin for the Xfce panel with nvidia gpu support
1 extra/xfce4-sensors-plugin 1.4.4-1 (198.8 KiB 808.5 KiB) [xfce4-goodies] 
    Sensors plugin for the Xfce panel
==> Packages to install (eg: 1 2 3, 1-3 or ^4)
==> 1
Sync Explicit (1): xfce4-sensors-plugin-1.4.4-1
[sudo] password for unperson: 
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (8) exo-4.18.0-1  garcon-4.18.2-1  libwnck3-43.0-3  libxfce4ui-4.18.6-1  libxfce4util-4.18.2-1  xfce4-panel-4.18.6-1
             xfconf-4.18.3-1  xfce4-sensors-plugin-1.4.4-1

Total Download Size:    2.66 MiB
Total Installed Size:  15.76 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] 

Once upon a time if you pressed F1 on the desktop a full manual showed up that started with “how to use a mouse” and ended with registry hacks. It was contextual so if you were in the calculator it showed information about the calculator.

Today if you press F1 it opens Microsoft™ Edge™ with a Microsoft™ Bing™ search for how to get help with windows. The results include some shitty youtube videos that somebody uploaded with that exact phrase.

I doubt they worried about being condescending, lots of people fear that the official documentation will be too difficult and never read it. The logic is that the docs are arcana written by witches that know how to write programming languages, and the tutorials are written by regular girls that had to struggle to understand the language instead of the syntax just appearing on their heads.

I pretty much learned how to program from the official Python tutorial. I had been struggling for years before that; I had some notions but I couldn’t put together anything really useful. The Python docs got me over the hump precisely because of what OP said: it starts from 0 and builds up until you have enough tools to write whatever project you have in mind. I imagine that having had to design and reason everything about the language actually gives the writer a great sense of how it fits together and what the logical increments are.

Since then I always go first to whatever the language designers wrote; for example K&R’s The C Programming Language, the Rust book, the Postgresql manual, etc, and only once I feel that I know enough I complement it with other sources.

This approach extends to libraries as well: first I read whatever official docs there are, then I search the source code for the functionality I need to learn about, and only if that fails I look elsewhere.

It seems like a slow method but it’s so reliable that it works out for me. After a while of doing this you become the reference and people come ask you questions.

Python in particular is very well documented. There are two levels, the official tutorial that glosses over stuff and presents things conceptually, and the reference that tells you exactly what is happening and what the syntax does.

That whole chapter about the data model is really useful when you try to do anything fancy with Python. It’s all in one page so you can Ctrl-F all the arcane definitions.

• mindustry: RTS with production lines. It’s got a bit of a learning curve.
• hyperrogue: roguelike that takes place in the hyperbolic plane. It’s more fun to not research how it works and just hit play: you die if a monster touches you, but the game will not let you make a losing move, so you only lose when you’re “checkmated”.

Of course you had to have something to drive the VGA outputs. Usually this meant a VIA, SiS, or Unichrome chip in the motherboard. Those chips often had no 3D acceleration at all, and a max resolution of 1280x1024. You were lucky to have shaders instead of fixed-function pipelines in 2008-era integrated graphics, and hardware accelerated video decoding was unheard of. The best integrated GPUs were collaborations with nVidia that basically bundled a GPU with the mainboard, but those mainboards were expensive.

Windows Vista did not run well at all on these integrated chips, but nobody liked Windows Vista so it didn’t matter. After Windows 7 was released, Intel started bundling their “HD Graphics” on CPUs and the on-die integrated GPU trend got started. The card in the picture belongs to the interim time where the software demanded pixel shaders and high-resolution video but hardware couldn’t deliver.

They left a lot of work for the CPU to do: if you try to browse hexbear on them you can see the repainting going from top bottom as you scroll. You can’t play 720p video and do anything else with the computer at the same time, because the CPU is pegged. But if you put the 9500 GT on them then suddenly you can use the computer as a HTPC. It was not an expensive card, it was 60-80 USD, and it was a logical upgrade to a tower PC you already have to make it more responsive and enable it to play HD video.