nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 3 Posts
  • 183 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • This is true. However, the things that has me excited is that, since they are SiFive cores, they should be fully compliant with the RISC-V spec (as of the HW implementation). Other recent Linux-capable RISC-V chips, such as the T-Head C910 have been non-compliant, either due to being released before extension acceptance (Vector extension want at 1.0 before they shipped the design) or hardware design bug (floating point module does not raise underflow exceptions, causing violation of IEEE754, and non-compliance with the RISC-V spec). Issues like these have caused them to be blocked for mainline kernel support (implementing support for non-compliant chips breaks support for compliant chips or requires support of a “sub-arch”).

    Nonetheless, I hope this does well and helps drive improved support for newer and faster RV64 chips.







  • I have a first gen pair of Airs that I absolutely love, except for the lack of open-ness. I think that I’ll have to try dumping the firmware and writing my own at some point - likely when I have to replace the frames (have had to CA glue and tape the right arm three times now; I’m rough on my electronics). The teardowns that I’ve seen show that they contain almost entirely common off-the-shelf components (MCU, IMU, I/O expander, etc), so, shouldn’t be too bad to implement via Arduino or Rust.

    The thing that drives me most crazy though is the lack of forethought on the Beam. It does it’s job great but they didn’t bother to have a dedicated power-in or support high enough wattage to run it off of external power. It’s absolutely maddening to have to recharge it 3/4 of the way through work. Think I’ll be modifying it to add a USB-PD input for power.








  • I just wanted to offer some nuance to the table. After everything has been learned, enabling some (otherwise complex and obscure) features can be accomplished by a single line in your NixOS config. Like, this efficiency can not and should not be ignored.

    I really appreciate it. I really WANT to like NixOS. The level of efficiency and portability (ex. Nix as package manager) is incredible and, I think, well worth learning about both for users and distros - I hope we see the ideas propagate further. It’s just not in a place that I can be happy using it. But, it is going to tickle some people the right way and that is something that makes me happy.

    Fedora Atomic does deliver on those without requiring you to go into the deep and learn an entire new language that’s only used for managing your distro 😅.

    This right here is why I’m liking it so far. I’m like Alton Brown is to cooking gadgets when it comes to languages in computing, I really don’t like unitaskers. I get unreasonably resentful of software that forces me to use a DSL (this is a “me” problem).


  • Does it require you to climb through heaps of trash documentation? Absolutely.

    That’s why I think the previous commenter’s statement rings true. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for over a decade across multiple distros. NixOS is not intuitive for new or seasoned users, making good documentation vital.

    An example: I spent a good weekend day or so poking at NixOS. Live boot worked as expected. When I finished, I had a bootable system but no network stack, despite following the docs. This means that my only route forward would be going back to the live boot since there was no way to pull packages in that state.

    I decided to go with Fedora Silverblue as my next test. After dding the image to my USB, it took about 10 mins to get up and running. I was able to setup libvirt and other similar software quick and easy. And once I’m happy, I can write my config to a repo and have my base system wherever, whenever.