@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

gabrielesvelto

@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org

Old school nerd.
Knows things about computers that would drive you insane.
Hacks on Firefox at Mozilla.

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gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

I read an article about gender inequalities in Italy which stated that - among other things - less than 10% of Italian men clean the bathroom.

So this morning, while I was cleaning our bathroom, I've got the idea that we should make a percenter group of men who clean bathrooms, to lampoon the similarly named far-right groups.

Of course we'd go full testoterone-machismo about it, how it's the quintessential manly activity, and how getting rid of limescale and mold stains makes you a mega chad.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@eniko

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@pbone I'd sign up for that!

hsivonen, to random
@hsivonen@mastodon.social avatar

I’m planning air travel from Helsinki to Seoul with my child who is going to be two years old at the time of travel. I have no experience with air travel with a 2-year-old.

Finnair says that it‘s OK to bring a car child seat approved for airplane use. The EU even recommends doing so, but I gather it isn’t actually common. (Is it?) The standard number trail both from Finnair directly and via the EU regulation lead to https://www.tuv.com/landingpage/en/manufacturer-of-child-seats/ .

…

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@hsivonen my kids always traveled on a regular seat, I've never been asked to use a car seat and never seen one on a plane in all frankness. That being said keeping a 2yo put on a plane is a big challenge, and I doubt a car seat would help much there

blabberlicious, to TeslaMotors
@blabberlicious@toot.community avatar

“Neuralink’s first in-human brain implant has experienced a problem, company says”

denies it, and blamed a worm for leaking false information.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@blabberlicious this is one of those "if this wasn't a tragedy it'd be a comedy"

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Isn't Stack Overflow acting like they own content users wrote against the law? Like I'm aware it doesn't matter unless someone takes them to court over it but I'm pretty sure when someone creates a post they own that work, not the site it was posted to

EDIT: And no I don't consider putting "all content submitted now belongs to us" in your TOS or EULA as a valid legal strategy to obtain ownership, for many reasons including that this is almost certainly an overreach of an agreement that courts have repeatedly said nobody actually reads, but also because as I understand it there are many countries where copyright can never be fully transferred from the original creator to 3rd parties

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@eniko IANAL but I think this would run afoul of the GDPR

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@eniko even ignoring the legal aspects I guess one can still mess with them, especially for programming/sysadmin stuff. Go to your answers and change a single character to make it non-sensical or flat out wrong. Turn && int &, == into =, change the sign of operations, etc...

noelreports, to random
@noelreports@mstdn.social avatar

The traditional T-34 leading the parade of Russian military equipment in Moscow. Let's see how much more equipment they are able to 'show off'.

video/mp4

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@noelreports one of these days it'll come with a cope cage

fabrice, to random
@fabrice@fosstodon.org avatar

Excellent thread by @gabrielesvelto ! I wonder what this means for efforts to "keep devices working longer" like @postmarketOS . Is that a losing battle if the HW goes bad anyway?

https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/112407741329145666

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@fabrice @postmarketOS we need both, better/longer software support and more reliable hardware.

gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Now there's a few things that are worth mentioning: users with bad hardware will be over-represented in this category, their machines will crash far more often than others.

The second thing is that Firefox is exceptionally stable, we've driven down its crash rate by more than >70% in the last few years. But Firefox is also a 30 million-lines-of-code monster. There are bugs in there, but they're less common than hardware failures! 12/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Plotting these types of crashes against time yields interesting trends: the more machines age the more likely they are to encounter hardware-related failures. You might think that's obvious, and indeed it is, but until now the industry has looked the other way, based on the hand-wavy excuse that hardware failures were less common than bugs. 13/17

gabrielesvelto, (edited )
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

So what needs to change? First of all, error detection and correction must become commonplace. You can already build a desktop machine with ECC memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory), but it's uncommon in laptops, even mobile workstations, and completely absent on phones and other consumer appliances. This will measurably lengthen the usable life of these devices. 14/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Note that detection is more important than correction. The user needs to know that there's something wrong without having to run a memory testing program. Think of the lights that turn on in cars if something's malfunctioning, or the error beeps that your washing machine makes when it thinks it's leaking water. These are extremely common, they need to be on computing devices too. 15/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Finally hardware design must change to make devices repairable and prolong their useful life. Yes, I'm looking at non-ECC memories soldered on the motherboard or worse, on the same substrate as the CPU. 16/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

To end the thread I'd like to thank my colleagues Alex Franchuk and @willcage who did the implementation work and my boss Gian-Carlo Pascutto who plotted crashes against machine age. I'd also like to point out that we've got preliminary data on the topic, but I fully intend to write a proper article with a detailed analysis of the data. 17/17

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@qqmrichter Firefox has limited control over what web pages do. When memory usage gets out of hand it's usually the page's fault. When I mentioned that Firefox is exceptionally stable I mean it, we've dramatically cut OOMs just a couple of years back, which is why we're now seeing even the hardware issues: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/11/improving-firefox-stability-with-this-one-weird-trick/

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@qqmrichter we already do that. We do a lot of stuff when memory is tight. We purge caches, trim buffers, unload tabs that haven't been used in a while, do aggressive garbage collection, etc... Sometimes there's just no way to avoid an OOM, especially in the case of pages with runaway memory consumption or if other applications are also using resources on the machine.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@ollibaba @qqmrichter yes, runaway memory consumption in websites is common. See this for example: https://nolanlawson.com/2021/12/17/introducing-fuite-a-tool-for-finding-memory-leaks-in-web-apps/

Firefox already does a fairly good job at keeping these pages at bay, but if you need something more active there's addons which can be used to unload unused tabs to free resources: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-reloader/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@ondra yes that happens, but that's a well understood and well studied phenomenon - especially in the context of data centers. When people talk about bit-flips that 's the first thing that comes to mind. I'd like to change this perception to make people realize that actual hardware faults are a lot more common than cosmic-ray hits.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@tomayac good point, I'd add the link to the post

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@rlb we've reduced OOM crashes massively in the past few years: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/11/improving-firefox-stability-with-this-one-weird-trick/

We already handle gracefully all the failures that we can realistically handle, but for a lot of them there's nothing we can do. That's especially true on non-Windows platforms where allocations never fails. Both on Linux and Android the kernel will kill processes to save memory without informing them or allowing for any type of reaction, so graceful handling is impossible.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@cr1901 yes, it is worse than 40 years ago! This is an area where we've actively regressed

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@ali1234 because statistically they happen more frequently in pieces of code that touch a lot of memory. Firefox' JavaScript garbage collector is one such example. It traverses the heap using GC's typical mark & sweep behavior and touches thousands upon thousands of objects, crossing over an enormous amount of pointers. Because it's far more likely to hit a bad bit than the rest of the code it will show up far more often. Same for code that traverses huge hash tables, etc...

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@kamstrup that was true for a while, then it was forked into PCMemTest by Martin Whitaker, and merged back with the memtest86+ codebase and now it's maintained by both the original author (Sam Demeulemeester) and the Martin Whitaker. The 7.0 major release dates back to this January.

gabrielesvelto,
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

@ali1234 this is very interesting, yeah that's another workload which ends up touching a ton of memory

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