trentnelson

May need to be fail-closed.

Possibly an unpopular opinion on this forum, but virtual memory has always been one of the strengths of the NT kernel. (And integration between the cache manager, virtual memory manager, file system (NTFS), overlapped I/O, completion ports, and threading. It’s a very robust and performant foundation when leveraged correctly.)

Not ssh related but I regularly suspend my terminal with Ctrl-S by accident, usually when going for Ctrl-C/V.

That was a nightmare to triage back in the late 90s when I did it. Thankfully Ctrl-Q (I think it’s Q) “resumes”, so, easy fix if you know what you’ve done.

WaitForMultipleObjects is fascinating behind the scenes. A single thread can wait on up to 64 independent events, which is done by plumbing the KTHREAD data structure with literally 64 slots for dispatcher header stuff, plus all the supporting Ke/dispatcher logic in the kernel.

There’s never been a POSIX equivalent to this. It requires sophisticated kernel support and the exact same parity can’t be achieved in user space alone.

When the PDIMMs were used with an appropriate file system + kernel, it was pretty cool. NTFS + DAX + kernel support yielded a file system where mmap’ing didn’t page fault. No page faults because the file content is already there, instantly.

So if you had mmap heavy read/write workloads… you could do some pretty cool stuff.

Well now I’m curious how they did it in the 90s. Some poor schmo doing pixel by pixel font creation?

If you’ve got an existing paragraph written that you just know could be rephrased more eloquently, and can describe the type of rephrasing/restructuring you want… LLMs absolutely slap at that.

I mean to be fair, WSL1 and WSL2 are extremely successful engineering efforts by Microsoft. I can’t imagine having to go back to the Cygwin days.

I finished this article in February this year, just before joining NVIDIA. It didn't get officially published then for... reasons. Posting now despite some of the information being a little out of date as I still think the content might be useful to others.

Tried to make the article as readable as possible on mobile, tablet, and desktop. Mobile necessitated a smaller font size for the code to obviate the need for horizontal scrolling.

Light/dark mode is supported, and the images are even cognizant of the selected mode!

I am doing a talk at PyData Seattle this year (Nov 7-9) focused on this topic, so any feedback regarding additional areas of interest would be appreciated.

Oh man, the Abit motherboards! That takes me back. How much did this cost and at what time? Presume very late 90s.

I remember my first job in 2000, straight out of 1.5 years of college, getting to play directly with Digital UNIX and Alpha processors! The Alpha 21264 was a beast at the time.

Based on an earlier comment, I think the person you're replying to is the author of aider.

It’s insane how hard hovering is. I had about 35 hours of fixed wing time, and treated myself to a helicopter lesson for my birthday.

Hovering was so humbling! You’d be stable for a few seconds and then oops now we’re suddenly crabbing backwards whilst rolling laterally whilst exacerbating everything with pilot-induced oscillations in every conceivable axis of movement.

Having to constantly enter three inputs whenever the external environment changes (ie wind, gust), or any time any one of the three inputs change… it absolutely requires some new neural pathways to be forged!

I flew with Patty Wagstaff many years later and even she admitted hovering was so hard, to the point it looked like she wasn’t going to be able proceed with her rotor license (before it all clicked).