Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | StillBored's commentslogin

I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.

I just wish they would make another pass at cleaning up the stack. It should be easy to `git clone --recurse-submodules rocm` followed by a configure/make that both prints out missing dependencies and configures without them, along with choices for 'build the world' vs just build some lower level opencl/HIP/SPIRV tooling without all the libraries/etc on top in a clear way.

Right now the entire source base is literally throw a bunch of crap into the rocm brand and hope it builds together vs some overarching architecture. Presumably the entire spend it also tied to "whatever big Co's evaluation needs this week" when it comes to developing with it.


I recently dumped opnsense because they took a stand against a few things I was trying to do (ex, webUI on wan port IIRC) which make sense at a high level. But I _HATE_ devices that think they know better than me. I was trying to configure it on a _LAN_ such that the identified WAN side was actually my local lan, and I spent an hour hacking it to work and was like "you know if they can't get this shit right i'm out". There are a lot of places in the technology world where someone who thinks they understand my use case makes a decision based on some narrow world view because they can't understand that not everyone trying to use their product is some idiot home user using it for their home network.


I've been a fan of opnSense for a few years now - I'm actually using it as the WAN device for our office, as well as a VPN concentrator in other contexts.

Some recent changes are driving me up the wall though - their new UIs for configuring VPNs (IPSEC and OpenVPN) are far less intuitive than what they've termed the 'legacy' UI and I note that recent versions have introduced a firewall rule migration feature that I'm not touching with a 9-ft barge pole.

These changes are making me wary about using opnSense in future, which is a pity because other than pfSense there isn't really a fully-featured, open-source firewall OS that comes close to matching it (and pfSense has its own issues). Linux is great and all - and I do use it for routing/firewall/VPN in places on our network - but there doesn't seem to be a dedicated network appliance distro that bundles in a comprehensive Web UI. Apart from OpenWRT and its ilk, but I'm not convinced that that's suitable for enterprise deployment.


I've got one of those N100+10Gbit router devices with a handful of ports. It seems a pretty reasonable device with one of the router distros running on it, but it doesn't seem nearly as efficient as my ucg-fiber/route10 devices, and that wouldn't bother me except that I suspect the packet latency is significantly higher too. Those devices AFAIK have hardware programmable router chips, which means the forwarding is done 100% without the interaction of the main CPU, so there isn't any interrupt/polling/etc delays when a packet arrives, the header gets rewritten, the checksum verified and off it goes.

Anyone actually measured this? I see a lot of bandwidth/etc style tests but few that can show the actual impact of enabling disabling deep packet inspection and a few of the other metrics that I actually care about. Serve the home seems to have gotten some fancy test HW but they don't seem to be running these kinds of tests yet.


From what I can tell you're pretty much right. A linux bridge cannot possibly be as efficient or speedy as a dedicated switch asic. OpenWRT has support for a few different hardware switch kernel APIs, but you can't exactly buy one of those on a PCIe card and I've never seen one of those N100-class boards with one instead of a set of i226 ethernet controllers taking most of the PCIe lanes.

Mikrotik sells the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, which is a fascinating device:

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie

It is a full Mikrotik router stripped down to just a board and hung off a PCIe interface. Iirc by default it exposes a virtual gigabit interface to the host and otherwise acts exactly like a CCR2004 running RouterOS.

Doesn't really buy you anything vs a RB5009 unless you can use the pair of 25Gbps ports, but it sure is neat.


The hardware-based routers have low latency. Fortigate advertises under 5 usec forwarding latency for its routers. Linux kernel forwarding is on the order of 10s of usec. However, under 100 usec of latency is negligible over a WAN link, where you're talking ~5 msec latency even on a fast fiber link. The downside of hardware routing is the lack of flexibility and some performance cliffs. On the consumer grade hardware routers in particular, connection setup is handled by a low-power ARM CPU. You have limits on the number of flows you can accelerate in hardware at a time, etc.

I've got a 10G fiber connection, and I swapped out a Fortigate 100F for a server running VyOS. I had performance problems, because the 10G to 1G transition caused dropped packets at the switch. I was able to solve it by shaping the traffic to the 1G devices to handle queuing in the router, which is something this particular Fortigate can't do. (High end routers have algorithms like WRED designed to get TCP to behave nicely on 10G to 1G drops, but I don't want the noise of a Cisco in my basement.)


It's less about "hardware is always lower latency" and more about when the fast path stays enabled vs when you fall off it

RIP, truly one of the greats.

His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.

PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.


Its not against the law in any US state (a quick search seems to back this up) to pass on the right. With one huge gotcha, it must be "safe" defined in various ways.

OTOH, most states have a stay right except to pass, slower traffic keep right laws.

Which means, that unless the person to your right is weaving through traffic, driving on the shoulder, or a few other bits of unsafe behavior, if someone passes you on the right your likely the one violating the law by not moving right when your not actively overtaking/passing someone.


In Austin too, and probably just caused a driver to think the same thing. They were in the left lane on a frontage road which was suddenly turning left even though there was an entire lane opposite the intersection blocked off by those plastic things that seem popular to randomly place in the road these days. I saw them hesitate and figured they wanted to merge right, so i decelerated a bit to add another car length or or so, at maybe 10-15mph. They had plenty of space, flipped on their blinker, and instead of just merging started slowing down, to which I decided I wasn't going to brake more to allow them to block myself and everyone else from rolling through the intersection. They basically stopped in their lane, and beeped as I rolled by, to which someone behind them beeped at them for blocking the lane.

In Austin if you want to merge, decide if you can, blink and then merge.

Don't expect people to stomp on their brakes and stop to let you in, especially if your already traveling slower than the lane you are trying to get into and decide to further slow yourself.

And if you can't merge, deal with it, exit, or miss your exit and go around. Next time you will be more prepared or you will learn how to properly merge.


Why? If everyone followed the rules the lanes would segment into slowest on the right, with gradually increasing speed to the left and people moving between the lanes as needed to overtake. It would be far far far better than the chaos of having to move across all the lanes of traffic all the time because there are random campers driving below the speed limit in every single lane.


First, everyone switches right as soon as there's a gap in a righter lane, so lots of unnecessary switching. Second, the right lane is always full making it hard to merge on or off the highway. Third, the leftmost lanes are underutilized when they could be filled with people who have a long way to go until their offramp.


There are whole catagories of people without "ID" as such, like say underage children or people unable to drive. ID's in the USA have traditionally been either drivers licenses or passports. Many states have added non-drivers license IDs for handicapped, elderly, etc, but AFAIK they aren't particularly popular since those catagories of people don't tend to need them until they suddenly find themselves in a situation needing one.


But the airlines don't really give a crap, southwest started basically as an air bus, show up buy a ticket get on. No reservation, no id, nothing.

The airlines don't even check ID most of the time with these electronic boarding passes if your not checking luggage.


If you are flying domestically, the airline doesn’t care. They know that someone bought a ticket to get pass security and that ticket matched the ID of the person who got through security. They don’t lose money and thier is no increased safety risk.

They do check your ID for international flights


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: