Giovanni's blog

Red Hat 7.2 (2001) with 8MB RAM Red Hat 7.2 System Information  Two nights ago (technically Saturday night) I spent some time using free tokens from Replit, Github Codespace, and Gemini to understand for myself what goes into kernel and system development. While I have read Linux From Scratch excerpts and countless resources, sometimes it is more interesting (or at a loss of ideas?) to see AI attempt to develop an operating system image. The first few attempts I got a non bootable image, around 5-6MB in size. The later ones determined what was missing and I ended up with a stalled bootup process (further than before) at around 20-29MB (the request was to make it less than 30MB, which it did). Those sizes were requested because I knew they were possible and bootable (such as Tiny Core Linux and SliTaz 's core ISO- their images are also bootable in under 30MB). However, without knowing enough steps, the code assistant can sometimes repeat the same mistake a few times, and it wastes...

PSI Raining on the CPU Scheduler   As I began familiarizing myself with various Yocto builds, I watched a few Yocto tutorials on optimizing compilation times, and came across a 2022 video  "making bitbake Psi-chic" and other tutorials to enable  PSI at GRUB.conf for Yocto builds (2022 Slides ).  from p.7&8 of the 2022 Slides & /layers/bitbake/lib/bb/runqueue.py (it appears the BB_PRESSURE_MAX_{CPU|IO|MEMORY} was not found in local.conf)   However, the feature was added only in kernel versions 4.2 through 5.15, where a proc/pressure folder exists. According to this presentation , a new process needs to be used to enable it for kernel versions after that (e.g. 5.20+). Some distros do not even compile it so you have to check which kernel and distro version you have. ( Edit: 7-12-26 : Some 2023 forums confirm it was removed after kernel 5.15, and it needs to be recompiled with a distro if someone wants to use it. Also, it confirms Arch and Zen kernel use ...

Last fall, I tested my first Yocto (5.0) linux builds on a couple machines from last decade: a 2011 Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 420 with an i3 2350M and 6GB of RAM, and a Ryzen 5 1600 with 16GB of RAM. The latter is quite capable , but I honestly found it more interesting to see the dual core i3 (w/ 4 threads) manage to compile a  core-image-minimal.  I even wrote an installation log about the process (I recorded video with the Ryzen using Ubuntu's built-in CPU-based GNOME Recorder, since it has 12 threads and the GPU (a Radeon 6450 or R5 240) I was using didn't have at least VCE 1.0 ), whereas I only took screenshots on the i3 2350m during load , to limit crashing) With the release of Yocto 6.0.1 LTS Wrynose , I was curious to test out BitBake, on a PC in between the performance of the i3 2350m and the Ryzen 5 1600. My 2015 FX8320E with 8 threads (it's called an 8 core but it's really a quad core with 2 threads each). I built this PC with parts from MicroCenter and Newegg, ...

I learn a lot about software optimizations by picking the slowest   procedure to complete something. Running a software or OS update in the background on a fast computer with a fast internet connection is usually an easy task because it is really invisible. This is the most common sense solution for anyone with those pre-requisites. But what if you have a slow internet connection? I have noticed Chrome and Firefox have what's called "differential" updates when a browser is already installed. For minor security updates, this might 10-12MB. For a major release, such as Chrome 150, which was released June 30th, this is a 100MB+ update. The full installation file is somewhere around 465MB. I happened to have a lazy day today with few obligations, so I did a little experiment. I have two Windows 10 PCs- one a tower, and the other a laptop, with a 64 bit version of Windows. One OS is actually Windows 10 Pro, so it's possible that the Chrome versions for each are slightly ...