mattst88

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
517
Submissions
126
Member since
Apr 28
https://mattst88.com/

Netflix. ex-Google. ex-Intel. Gentoo Developer.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
I also have an ES47 (running Linux)! Would you send me an email to my username at gmail? I've been working on a remote management tool for the ES47 that allows controlling the fan speeds that you might be interested in.
Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
I suspect you mean glibc.
Comment · 8 months ago
I've loaded the PROM in Ghidra. The ability to decompile to C is great.

I looked at some particular parts of the PROM that took a while to understand to see if I could have understood them quicker with Ghidra. In particular, the part of `sloader` that searches for the `post1` and `firmware` sections and then calls `post1(&firmware)`. Given that I already understand how this works, I can see that this is happening from the decompiled C, but the lack of labels, comments, etc really hampers my ability to understand from the decompiled C alone.

This might all be down to inexperience with the tool.

The ability to iteratively add a label, rerun the decompiler, reread the decompiled assembly, make more inferences was really the key to building an understanding for me.

Another aspect I'm unsure how to handle in Ghidra is that the base address differs between sections of the firmware. E.g. the `firmware` section is copied to RAM and executed from `0x81000000`. It's not clear to me how to configure this in a granular way, rather than a single base address for the whole PROM image.

Comment · 8 months ago
Thanks!

I'll give Ghidra a try!

Comment · 8 months ago
Yes, I submitted it as "PROM". I have no idea why it has been changed.
Comment · 1 year ago
Alpha 21264 is out-of-order.
Comment · 2 years ago
The judgement (https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/COPA-v-W...) very clearly demonstates the truth of Brandolini's Law:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

Incredible the amount of detail the judgement goes into in documenting how big a fraud Craig Wright is.

Comment · 2 years ago
> Burnout is your brain giving up because it doesn’t think the benefit is worth the effort anymore. If you don’t have a purpose for what you are doing all your brain will do is obsess over the negatives. Every job in the world has massive negatives. You have to find a positive purpose for what you are doing to balance the negative.

This is spot on and was exactly my experience at my last job.

The one thing I'll add is that for me it wasn't about not having a purpose, it was about not feeling appreciated for all of the time/effort/energy I'd poured into that purpose.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, it's still used in the Intel 3D drivers in Mesa (at least).
Comment · 2 years ago
On an Intel GPU, you can check the 'Video' percentage in `sudo intel_gpu_top` (from the igt-gpu-tools package) while playing a video.
Comment · 2 years ago
That's right. "Software decoding" means the decoding algorithms run on the CPU. (As opposed to "hardware decoding" which typically means the work is done by some fixed-function video units on e.g. a GPU)
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Are you familiar with source-based distributions?

I'm not rebuilding specifically for this one potential optimization.

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