Ontopic Random Computer-Electronics Thread

fly said:
Again, I'm aware. I read all this way before you did. The NIC is too new to work with linux without linux having to be linux.
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Stable is 5.12.2, nooblet.

Sassy Red Wine GIF by Married At First Sight
 
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Jehannum said:
It's an acceptable compromise. It's the way shit's been done since idiots started claiming that firmware was somehow a trade secret.
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These days, wireless cards and pretty much everything else have simple bootloaders in them, and the driver loads their SRAM with the actual real firmware.

And the actual real firmware contains all sorts of third party code like RTOSes, air interface code, etc... which could come from a dozen different vendors that are all happy selling their proprietary, patent-encumbered code for $$$ and don't want to see it open sourced. And they have the right to be that way.

Open sourcing all the bits to make the binary blob that gets loaded into the module is damn near impossible at this point... it's just easier to give the open source folks a blob and say "load this"
 
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gee said:
These days, wireless cards and pretty much everything else have simple bootloaders in them, and the driver loads their SRAM with the actual real firmware.

And the actual real firmware contains all sorts of third party code like RTOSes, air interface code, etc... which could come from a dozen different vendors that are all happy selling their proprietary, patent-encumbered code for $$$ and don't want to see it open sourced. And they have the right to be that way.

Open sourcing all the bits to make the binary blob that gets loaded into the module is damn near impossible at this point... it's just easier to give the open source folks a blob and say "load this"
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Yeah, I figured fuckery like that was afoot.

I think the first time I saw it was in the Matrox G400 vidja card, which needed some manner of closed-source firmware to enable a unified framebuffer that drove two monitors.
 
Jehannum said:
Go run your shitty VHDL on QNX then if it's so super cereal.
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A couple of us spent months writing a RTP endpoint that ran in kernel mode, adding an audio resampling engine and a bunch of other crap to it.

That was a big project to allow FM radio single frequency networks, with audio content delivered over IP to potentially dozens of transmit sites covering the same area, and everything had to be in sync or the whole thing would fall to pieces. "At the exact edge of the GPS 1PPS pulse, this exact audio sample has to start leaving the synchronous serial port on the processor, to get passed to the DSP to get broadcasted"

Except the serial port free-runs, so the processor has to say "well 25% of the sample was out already, so the audio has to be processed to add a 1/4 sample delay to it to accomplish the same thing"

That was a great big pain in the ass but we made it work, and now people can listen to their shitty FM radio in big skyscapery cities, without dead zones interrupting their Weenie and the Butt jokes!

 
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wsl2 is slick. Im up and running and got a python watchdog that I wanted to run that didnt play nice with windows going in about 10 minutes. And i dont have to fuck about with CIFS to point it to places in the windows dir structure for file access
 
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Jehannum said:
Yeah, I figured fuckery like that was afoot.

I think the first time I saw it was in the Matrox G400 vidja card, which needed some manner of closed-source firmware to enable a unified framebuffer that drove two monitors.
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I don't think I've heard the name Matrox in like 20 years.
 
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Jehannum said:
I had a Voodoo and a Voodoo2, but by the time the banshee was out, NVidia was the hot shit to have.
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It was a cheap build. Even scored a free PII 233 from work when it was still decent. Think I got it up to 300 or 333. Can't remember which. Played soooooo many hours of Unreal Tournament.
 
Used to lug my pc into work and play on our T1 in the conference room on the projector on the weekends when the office was empty. That was the shit.
 
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