Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
I am barely using any memory on a headless server - there is room for a ramdisk
# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 429 61 131 3 237
310
Swap: 99 0 99
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:34:45 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:I feared that might be the case.
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on
/var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
No. Files in /var are expected to survive reboot, so that's how the
packages
are configured.
They are created during package installation. For example,
$ rpm -q -l postgresql13-server|grep /var/log
/var/log/postgres
Looking at the spec file for the rpm package, it has ... %attr(700,postgres,postgres) %dir /var/log/postgres
which is used by rpm to set the ownership and permissions.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
This is in fact the default behaviour for Armbian on my Banana Pi M64.
If you want, I can send you the scripts used. They create the RAMDISK, copy the existing files on boot, then copy back during shutdown (so the log files are not lost).
On 29/07/2023 19:45, Robert Heller wrote:
This is in fact the default behaviour for Armbian on my Banana Pi M64.
If you want, I can send you the scripts used. They create the RAMDISK, copy
the existing files on boot, then copy back during shutdown (so the log files
are not lost).
I can write that ok myself.
However there would be no *controlled shutdown*. We are talking power cuts. The actual application does not write to SD disk at all, except for persistent configuration. Runtime files use a ram disk.
So the aim is to limit random writes that might happend when power is
pulled from under.
In use the only likely things would be systemd which logs everything
all the time, and apache.
Exim might send a mail a month.
Looking at the log files there is a huge amount of installation stuff
that simply isn't needed, and stuff that appears at boot time that
doesn't need to be preserved on power loss.
So I guess this is really a more general discussion about how to reduce logging to a minimum, and reduce writing to persistent storage to a
minimum as well
I can set apache to log to a volatile storage area OK I think.
And probably Exim too - mount ramdisks on /var/log/apache2 and
/var/log/exim4
The problem is that the whole*nix logging system is based on how a good minicomputer sysadmin would like things, not how an embedded linux
running off an SD card needs to be :-)
The problem is that the whole*nix logging system is based on how a good minicomputer sysadmin would like things, not how an embedded linux
running off an SD card needs to be :-)
On 29/07/2023 19:42, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:34:45 -0400, The Natural Philosopher
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on >>> /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
No. Files in /var are expected to survive reboot, so that's how the
packages
are configured.
They are created during package installation. For example,
$ rpm -q -l postgresql13-server|grep /var/log
/var/log/postgres
Looking at the spec file for the rpm package, it has ...
%attr(700,postgres,postgres) %dir /var/log/postgres
which is used by rpm to set the ownership and permissions.
I feared that might be the case.
At Sat, 29 Jul 2023 20:42:12 +0100 The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Looking at the log files there is a huge amount of installation stuff
that simply isn't needed, and stuff that appears at boot time that
doesn't need to be preserved on power loss.
So I guess this is really a more general discussion about how to reduce
logging to a minimum, and reduce writing to persistent storage to a
minimum as well
Embeded servers (eg OpenWRT) mount /var from a ramdisk at boot, and likely initially populate it that file system from some "static" initial state (with all of the basic directory tree elements) at boot time. And then on reboot/power failure, all of that is just lost (discarded). (Most OpenWRT-based servers have the option of remote logging, if one wants persistent logs.)
DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot Linux), also does this. It mounts the root (/) and
/usr file systems read-only from the server and create RAMDISK file systems for /etc /var and /root (~root) and populates these FSs from pre-generated tarballs and rsyncs host specific content from a template tree at boot time and then discards them on shutdown.
On a system that isn't designed for temporary /var, if you just
recreate empty directories in /var (those listed by
"find /var -type d") after reboot, I expect all the programs that
are already installed will create fresh files inside those
directories by themselves.
Embeded servers (eg OpenWRT) mount /var from a ramdisk at boot, and
likely initially populate it that file system from some "static" initial state (with all of the basic directory tree elements) at boot time.
Embeded servers (eg OpenWRT) mount /var from a ramdisk at boot, and likely initially populate it that file system from some "static" initial state (with all of the basic directory tree elements) at boot time. And then on reboot/power failure, all of that is just lost (discarded).
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 20:22:13 -0400, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> w
On a system that isn't designed for temporary /var, if you just
recreate empty directories in /var (those listed by
"find /var -type d") after reboot, I expect all the programs that
are already installed will create fresh files inside those
directories by themselves.
The owner, group, and permissions must be set correctly too.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
On 30/07/2023 04:27, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 20:22:13 -0400, Computer Nerd Kev
<not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
On a system that isn't designed for temporary /var, if you just
recreate empty directories in /var (those listed by
"find /var -type d") after reboot, I expect all the programs that
are already installed will create fresh files inside those
directories by themselves.
The owner, group, and permissions must be set correctly too.
Well you would just copy /var/log to somewhere on persistent, delete all
the files and then do a cp - R on reboot. Except that the first thing
that happens on boot is the daemons fill up /var/log with boot messages :-(
Ah well. The smallest SD card I could easily get was 16GB, and RasPios
and friends have only used 1.5GB.
It will probably take a long time to wear out.
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:34:45 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
No. Files in /var are expected to survive reboot, so that's how the packages are configured.
They are created during package installation. For example,
$ rpm -q -l postgresql13-server|grep /var/log
/var/log/postgres
Looking at the spec file for the rpm package, it has ... %attr(700,postgres,postgres) %dir /var/log/postgres
which is used by rpm to set the ownership and permissions.
In comp.sys.raspberry-pi David W. Hodgins <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:34:45 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on >>> /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
No. Files in /var are expected to survive reboot, so that's how the packages >> are configured.
They are created during package installation. For example,
$ rpm -q -l postgresql13-server|grep /var/log
/var/log/postgres
Looking at the spec file for the rpm package, it has ...
%attr(700,postgres,postgres) %dir /var/log/postgres
which is used by rpm to set the ownership and permissions.
The directory structure may be created by the package manager on install,
but the files are created on the fly. In other words I might have /var/log/foo/error.log - foo is a directory that needs to exist, but if I delete error.log it'll be created next time there's something to go in
there. This is commonly used by 'logrotate', which moves old files and compresses them, allowing new files to be created for future log entries.
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:
find /var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces /var/log/foo/bar/ to /tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:
The directory structure may be created by the package manager on
install, but the files are created on the fly. In other words I
might have /var/log/foo/error.log - foo is a directory that needs to
exist, but if I delete error.log it'll be created next time there's
something to go in there. This is commonly used by 'logrotate',
which moves old files and compresses them, allowing new files to be
created for future log entries.
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:
find /var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces /var/log/foo/bar/ to /tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is *immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
I guess I have to learn how to add a script to systemd :-(
Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is *immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
I guess I have to learn how to add a script to systemd :-(
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
find /var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces /var/log/foo/bar/ to /tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is *immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is *immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
I guess I have to learn how to add a script to systemd :-(
A systemd system might not have syslog, but journal, and non permanent
(not on disk). It may use temporary files, though.
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 30/07/2023 04:27, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 20:22:13 -0400, Computer Nerd Kev
<not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
On a system that isn't designed for temporary /var, if you just
recreate empty directories in /var (those listed by
"find /var -type d") after reboot, I expect all the programs that
are already installed will create fresh files inside those
directories by themselves.
The owner, group, and permissions must be set correctly too.
Well you would just copy /var/log to somewhere on persistent, delete all
the files and then do a cp - R on reboot. Except that the first thing
that happens on boot is the daemons fill up /var/log with boot messages :-(
This is of course not really the first thing that happens on boot,
so if you can get in before the init system starts daemons then
that solves your problem. I wouldn't like to try figuring out how
to do that with something like Systemd, but then I avoid that sort
of thing anyway.
On 7/30/23 10:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:Any process that has a log file open before you mount the ramdisk won't automatically start using it. The process will still have the open file handle to the original, disk-based file instead. So you'll either need
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
find/var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces/var/log/foo/bar/ to/tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is*immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
to be sure to mount the ramdisk sufficiently early in the boot sequence
to ensure that no daemons have opened their logfiles yet, or you'll need
to signal those daemons reopen their logs. Most do that in response to SIGHUP. Logrotate often uses that mechanism after rotating logs, so its configuration can help you figure out what needs to be done after
mounting the ramdisk if programs are still logging to disk.
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:
The directory structure may be created by the package manager on
install, but the files are created on the fly. In other words I
might have /var/log/foo/error.log - foo is a directory that needs to
exist, but if I delete error.log it'll be created next time there's
something to go in there. This is commonly used by 'logrotate',
which moves old files and compresses them, allowing new files to be
created for future log entries.
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:
find /var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces /var/log/foo/bar/ to /tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is *immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
You /may/ need to trigger the logging deamon to redo the files. With traditional syslog that would be send the log deamon's a sighub. With systemd I have no idea how to do this as none of my linux systems
contain systemd.
I guess I have to learn how to add a script to systemd :-(
True. Hopefully there is a way.
Ah well. The smallest SD card I could easily get was 16GB, and RasPiosI was curious about this once too - does a 16GB SD card where only
and friends have only used 1.5GB.
It will probably take a long time to wear out.
1.5GB is used last longer than say a 2GB card? I couldn't find a
conclusive answer online, except that an SD card's unlikely to be
near as smart about wear levelling as an SSD is.
On Sun, 30 Jul 2023 10:45:54 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there,
and mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is
*immediately* populated and directories created, then all should
work?
I guess I have to learn how to add a script to systemd :-(
I would add an entry to fstab to handle the mount ... mylog /var/log
tmpfs defaults,user,size=1G 1 1
Copy the directory structure from /var/log somewhere else such as
/my/log.
copy /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-remount-fs.service to /etc/systemd/system/, (create the dir if it doesn't exist already),
then modify the /etc service to add a second ExecStart to run a
script that copies the directory structure from /my log to /var/log.
Run "dracut -f" and reboot.
If you later install something that creates a directory in /var/log,
just create a directory with that name, owner, group, and
permissions in /my/log.
Make a backup on a second sd card first though, just in case! :-)
Regards, Dave Hodgins
There is no order of execution of systemd scripts. They all get
executed in parallel. Instead there are dependencies, which I THINK
are encapsulated in the scripts as 'depends upon', not 'is depended on
by'. So a standalone systemd script wont do the job. Instead one
would probably have to find the mount script and add a patch to that.
I think that SD cards (apart from a very few) have no sophisticated
wear levelling *at all*.
If they are *really* cheap they wont do anything at all and there
will be a 1:1 correlation between physical and logical sectors, in
which case it doesn't matter how big they are, they will wear out the directory and sector allocation sectors without ever using the
majority of the card.
I am not sure if e.g. linux can map out bad sectors in those areas.
I suspect not.
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
I think that SD cards (apart from a very few) have no sophisticated
wear levelling *at all*.
Given their race to the bottom price wise, this is a reasonably safe assumption.
If they are *really* cheap they wont do anything at all and there
will be a 1:1 correlation between physical and logical sectors, in
which case it doesn't matter how big they are, they will wear out the directory and sector allocation sectors without ever using the
majority of the card.
I am not sure if e.g. linux can map out bad sectors in those areas.
I suspect not.
If the hardware does not handle bad sector replacement then you'd need
to run a Linux filesystem that does do so on top. For an SD card,
that would likely best be one of the 'flash' filesystems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_file_system#Linux_flash_filesystems
As to which might be best for an SD card that might have minimal to no
on card wear leveling I can not say.
At Mon, 31 Jul 2023 13:25:28 -0000 (UTC) Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote: >>> I think that SD cards (apart from a very few) have no sophisticated
wear levelling *at all*.
Given their race to the bottom price wise, this is a reasonably safe
assumption.
If they are *really* cheap they wont do anything at all and there
will be a 1:1 correlation between physical and logical sectors, in
which case it doesn't matter how big they are, they will wear out the
directory and sector allocation sectors without ever using the
majority of the card.
I am not sure if e.g. linux can map out bad sectors in those areas.
I suspect not.
If the hardware does not handle bad sector replacement then you'd need
to run a Linux filesystem that does do so on top. For an SD card,
that would likely best be one of the 'flash' filesystems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_file_system#Linux_flash_filesystems
As to which might be best for an SD card that might have minimal to no
on card wear leveling I can not say.
I've been using SanDisk Class 10 uSD cards in various PIs, with the machines running continiously for years without errors. Some of these machines have survived multiple power failures without problems. Several of these machines I use as "build boxes". I have been using good old Ext4 as the FS.
Embedded Raspberry Pi Zero W. Minimal logs generated but I only use
logs for debugging and why wear the SD card?
My question is simple. If I make a 50MByte or so RAMDISK and mount it on /var/log, will the logging daemons recreate all the files and
directories they need at boot time?
At Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:59:48 +0100 The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Indeed. People DO have failures, but I can find no really clear data on
*why* they fail in a Pi situation
Ultra "cheap" no-name brand uSD cards?
On Bullseye and later the largest amount of logging activity to disc is bloody systemd's journald, which by default will grow /var/log/journal/*
to 2GB, taking up valuable space on SD cards and severely reducing their write life.
Two things you can do; first as fucking Peottering always knows best,
there is no way of turning off journald and just using the god given
rsyslog, but you can stop journald logging to disc and just keep it in
RAM instead by adding the following to /etc/systemd/journald.conf
Storage=volatile
RuntimeMaxUse=32M
RuntimeMaxFileSize=32M
ForwardToConsole=no
ForwardToWall=no
Secondly stop systemd spamming /var/log/syslog with all sorts of crap
you have no interest in. Create a file called /etc/rsyslog.d/drop.systemd.conf containing
# Drop messages from f***ing systemd
:programname,startswith,"systemd" stop
There are "Application Performance Class" cards now available which
focus on I/O operations per second instead of raw streaming read/write >speeds. They are identified as class A1 and A2. Sandisk seems to be the
main supplier.
One would hope that these cards would have wear levelling set up to
handle lots of small I/O operations but I suspect that's not part of the >spec...
This is in fact the default behaviour for Armbian on my Banana Pi M64.
Where in RAM does it keep it, or is that only known the the Great
Poettering, who has provided some buggy tool to access it?
successfuly got systemd journal to cease to exist on disk, and moved
nearly everything to a ram log.
As the man falling past the 13th floor yelled: 'so far. so good!'
Cron job reboots it every morning so I don't worry about ramdisk filling
up.
It's been running like this on the same SDCARD for 2+ years.
On 01/08/2023 08:08, mm0fmf wrote:
Cron job reboots it every morning so I don't worry about ramdisk
filling up.
It's been running like this on the same SDCARD for 2+ years.
My suggestion is to look at the logging levels of various processes, and ensure everything has a suitable log rotate configuration, so the size
of your logging directory is kept pretty static over time without having
to reboot. Particularly as booting does lots of logging, and once that
is rotated out, the size may go down slightly.
On 31/07/2023 02:54, 23k.302 wrote:
On 7/29/23 2:42 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On 7/30/23 10:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:Any process that has a log file open before you mount the ramdisk won't
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure:Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and
find/var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces/var/log/foo/bar/ to/tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is*immediately*
populated and directories created, then all should work?
automatically start using it. The process will still have the open file >>> handle to the original, disk-based file instead. So you'll either need >>> to be sure to mount the ramdisk sufficiently early in the boot sequence
to ensure that no daemons have opened their logfiles yet, or you'll need >>> to signal those daemons reopen their logs. Most do that in response to >>> SIGHUP. Logrotate often uses that mechanism after rotating logs, so its >>> configuration can help you figure out what needs to be done after
mounting the ramdisk if programs are still logging to disk.
Hmm ... MIGHT be able to make that work with minimal
pain using systemd. It has 'depends on','run after' and
such params. He could init the ramdisk REALLY early in a
quasi-structured/quasi-safe environment.
Not everyone likes systemd - but it DOES have its uses.
Another trick is to just make the ramdisk whenever and
then make /var/log into a symlink/mountpoint. Yes, there'd
be some early stuff still in the real /var/log, but maybe
that's not important for him.
However I'd rec ramdisks for where they're more useful.
I have an app that does a lot of image manipulation
before the results are shown via PHP/Apache on a Pi.
I don't want any of that to be reading/writing to the
SD card - too slow AND burns it out - but I did want
access to be "normal", like with any 'real' drive. A
small ramdisk was by far the best/easiest solution.
I use them in this and my other pi-zero context as fundamentally simple interprocess communicators. So in my Hifi Project, a daemon reads the
icecast info off radio streams and writes it to a file in a temporary
file system.
The web server then has access to that to let me know what misc is being played, via ajax calls from the web servers radio interface.
As long as only one process is writing them, this is a very simple and effective way to transfer data from one daemon to another.
In the current project which involves driving 4 mains relays using a
daemon that collects various bits of information in order to decide when
to switch them on, it is used to store the relay state, so again ajax
calls from the web server can determine not what *should be on, but what
is *actually* on.
I am sure the semaphores messages and pipes might have done the job, but simply recreating a file ion a ramdisk every few seconds works fine.
And by not continuously writing to the SD card with log files the chance
of a non booting unit is really rather small. In fact it is hardly
writing to the SD card AT ALL. now.
WE shall see.Having a machine far more capable than a PDP/11 cost less
than 25 with the SD card, and less than 50 all in with power supply
relays and hopefully 3D printed box, is stunning for basic networked
process control
Interesting philosophy. accept failure and plan round it rather than eliminating failure in the first place?
On 02/08/2023 05:41, 23k.304 wrote:
On 7/31/23 5:32 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, I learnt my code writing contract assembler for people who wanted it
On 31/07/2023 02:54, 23k.302 wrote:
On 7/29/23 2:42 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On 7/30/23 10:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 30/07/2023 10:24, Theo wrote:Any process that has a log file open before you mount the ramdisk
So all you really need to do is reproduce the directory structure: >>>>>>>Now that is interesting, and if I leave the old /var/log there, and >>>>>> mount a ramdisk over it, provided that the ramdisk is*immediately* >>>>>> populated and directories created, then all should work?
find/var/log -type d -exec mkdir -p "/tmp/{}" \;
which reproduces/var/log/foo/bar/ to/tmp/var/log/foo/bar/
Theo
won't
automatically start using it. The process will still have the open >>>>> file
handle to the original, disk-based file instead. So you'll either
need
to be sure to mount the ramdisk sufficiently early in the boot
sequence
to ensure that no daemons have opened their logfiles yet, or you'll
need
to signal those daemons reopen their logs. Most do that in
response to
SIGHUP. Logrotate often uses that mechanism after rotating logs,
so its
configuration can help you figure out what needs to be done after
mounting the ramdisk if programs are still logging to disk.
Hmm ... MIGHT be able to make that work with minimal
pain using systemd. It has 'depends on','run after' and
such params. He could init the ramdisk REALLY early in a
quasi-structured/quasi-safe environment.
Not everyone likes systemd - but it DOES have its uses.
Another trick is to just make the ramdisk whenever and
then make /var/log into a symlink/mountpoint. Yes, there'd
be some early stuff still in the real /var/log, but maybe
that's not important for him.
However I'd rec ramdisks for where they're more useful.
I have an app that does a lot of image manipulation
before the results are shown via PHP/Apache on a Pi.
I don't want any of that to be reading/writing to the
SD card - too slow AND burns it out - but I did want
access to be "normal", like with any 'real' drive. A
small ramdisk was by far the best/easiest solution.
I use them in this and my other pi-zero context as fundamentally
simple interprocess communicators. So in my Hifi Project, a daemon
reads the icecast info off radio streams and writes it to a file in a
temporary file system.
The web server then has access to that to let me know what misc is
being played, via ajax calls from the web servers radio interface.
As long as only one process is writing them, this is a very simple
and effective way to transfer data from one daemon to another.
Agreed. If you CAN keep it simple, DO keep it simple.
Remember YOU might have to debug/enhance it a few
years LATER :-)
well commented enough that the stupidest permie could fix it years later.
Or myself. Sometimes I look at stuff I wrote and marvel at ait.
I am not a computer scientist. Elegance isn't in my nature. I am a
software and other sorts of engineer, and making it work, and keep on
working at the lowets possible prices is burned into my soul
"An engineer is someone who can do for five bob what any damned fool can
do for a quid"
Things like Pi's are special cases - not blazing fast,Ha! compared with a Z80 with 48k of usable RAM or a 6809, they ARE
not a lot of RAM, run off SD cards/eMMC that have to be
protected from re-write fatigue. If the need for space
isn't excessive, and simplicity is worthwhile (almost
always) then a RAMdisk is often your best solution.
blazingly fast. I cut my teeth writing C and assembler for those, stuff
that was burned into ROM.
There is so much on this zero ROM - 16GB! And I have ram coming out of
my ears.
Because of the filesystem overhead, RAMdisks just MIGHTMy access requrements are measured in seconds, not micro seconds.
not be fast enough ... then you have to go to "less simple"
approaches alas. To each app, its own.
Oh there surely are faster, but who is in a hurry? a central heating controller changes states every few HOURS. and if the users browser viewIn the current project which involves driving 4 mains relays using a
daemon that collects various bits of information in order to decide
when to switch them on, it is used to store the relay state, so again
ajax calls from the web server can determine not what *should be on,
but what is *actually* on.
Cool stuff
I am sure the semaphores messages and pipes might have done the job,
but simply recreating a file ion a ramdisk every few seconds works
fine.
"Pipes" are a kind of cheat - really just "invisible" R/W files.
I used them kinda extensively on some forking servers I wrote a
couple of years ago in Python and 'C' to make data gathered by
new forks accessible to the mother process. They WORK just fine
and are commonly used and I *think* a tad faster than a RAMdisk,
but still ...
of that is a second behind, frankly who gives a damn?
Like wise room temperatures and tank oil levels are not things that
change much in an hour...
I'm fond of such 'servers' - even cobbled together a goodThe problem is that no one knows what is really happening, and although
"pre-forked" one - supposedly the highest-capacity/speed -
for both TCP and UDP - but never had a good high-volume
reason to use them. The best was almost like a 'chat' app,
non-sync bi-directional where the queen server process could
initiate, even push, tasks and messages to the clients. Fun !
Hmm ... now apparently some possible servants of Xi here
are calling me a "troll" because I repeated a few things
(said by HS/NSA/CIA) they didn't WANT to hear about
CCP sabotage-ware infiltrating almost everything in
our important infrastructure/military systems and
'devices' (which are almost entirely Linux/Unix-based).
One day soon they ARE gonna get a big wake-up call ... but
meanwhile denial means they won't DO anything about it :-)
the political narratives that are spun for consumption by hoi polloi,
are obviously not the real truth, no one knows what is. Not even the spinners.
I myself know for example, that there couldn't have been any weapons of
mass destruction *directly threatening British interests* in Iraq, and
that our prime minister lied about that. I spent a couple of years
designing missile parts and know in principle where the bleeding edge
is, and it sure ain't in Iraq.
I know that Covid injections do not put goverment control chips in your brain, They don't need to. They have the mass mediafor that :-)
I know the moon landings were real, because there wasn't the technology
then to fake it.
I know that 911 was a simple case of structural failure in a fire,
because everything about it is consistent with my knowledge of
structural engneering.
I dont know who apart from lee harvey oswald, might have shot JFK , or
why. |Jury still out.
I know that 'renewable' energy is a greater disaster than any climate
change, and I know that climate change is largely natural with very
little man made components. Because I did the years of research. And the problem is within my pay garde as an engineer with a good STEM background
I don't know who runs the world banks, but I an fairly sure its not
Jews, or Lizards.
I am however sure that they haven't a clue what they are doing.
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power goes out.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
On Wed, 02 Aug 2023 22:47:44 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Interesting philosophy. accept failure and plan round it rather than
eliminating failure in the first place?
Keeping backups comes from experience. Hardware fails, even sd cards, and >people make mistakes when deleting things.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power goes out.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum >reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum
reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
So much bloat these days just to say 'hello world'
I designed a ram disk for the Z80, wrote a CP/M clone too
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/z80/system14/diagrams/index.html
On 01/08/2023 21:47, Pancho wrote:
On 7/29/23 19:45, Robert Heller wrote:This product may end up in places where the user isn't smart enough to
This is in fact the default behaviour for Armbian on my Banana Pi M64.
+1, :-) I was just thinking, I spent ages undoing this, in order to
find out why my system was crashing. But I'm running Armbian.
TNP, FFS, SD cards cost buttons. Pack of two 32GB for less than a
tenner. If you are worried about wear, clone a new one every year, or
whatever.
do that.
Interesting philosophy. accept failure and plan round it rather than eliminating failure in the first place?
Interesting philosophy. accept failure and plan round it rather than eliminating failure in the first place?
On 2023-08-03, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Interesting philosophy. accept failure and plan round it rather than
eliminating failure in the first place?
That's old hat for anyone who's had to work with M$ products.
On 03/08/2023 10:43, Pancho wrote:
OK, I remember looking at this back in December and coming to the
conclusion it was hopeless. Micro SD cards (probably) don't do
active wear levelling + I wasn't clear what IO actually killed them.
I seem to remember, someone suggesting it was the EXT4 journal file
that was the problem rather than logs.
That is a slightly terrifying thought...does anyone have any more information?
Mm. It would seem that while journalling multiplies the number of
writes, it wont impact what amounts to a read-only or 'write very
rarely' filesystem.
That is a slightly terrifying thought...does anyone have any more information?
Mm. It would seem that while journalling multiplies the number of
writes, it wont impact what amounts to a read-only or 'write very
rarely' filesystem.
Phew.
Obviously of you are wring huge amounts of data over and over again you
would probably attach an SSD via USB anyway..
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single
file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
On 03/08/2023 10:43, Pancho wrote:
On 02/08/2023 17:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/08/2023 21:47, Pancho wrote:
On 7/29/23 19:45, Robert Heller wrote:This product may end up in places where the user isn't smart enough
This is in fact the default behaviour for Armbian on my Banana Pi M64. >>>>>
+1, :-) I was just thinking, I spent ages undoing this, in order to
find out why my system was crashing. But I'm running Armbian.
TNP, FFS, SD cards cost buttons. Pack of two 32GB for less than a
tenner. If you are worried about wear, clone a new one every year,
or whatever.
to do that.
OK, I remember looking at this back in December and coming to the
conclusion it was hopeless. Micro SD cards (probably) don't do active
wear levelling + I wasn't clear what IO actually killed them. I seem
to remember, someone suggesting it was the EXT4 journal file that was
the problem rather than logs.
That is a slightly terrifying thought...does anyone have any more information?
Mm. It would seem that while journalling multiplies the number of
writes, it wont impact what amounts to a read-only or 'write very
rarely' filesystem.
Phew.
Obviously of you are wring huge amounts of data over and over again you
would probably attach an SSD via USB anyway..
On Thu, 03 Aug 2023 14:57:22 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
That is a slightly terrifying thought...does anyone have any more
information?
Mm. It would seem that while journalling multiplies the number of
writes, it wont impact what amounts to a read-only or 'write very
rarely' filesystem.
Phew.
Obviously of you are wring huge amounts of data over and over again you
would probably attach an SSD via USB anyway..
I'm using 11 GB of a 32 GB sd card using ext4 on an rpi 4b. A little
slow to boot
but otherwise performance pretty good. It's running kde plasma, with no workarounds
to avoid extra writes, just disabling things I don't like in plasma like desktop
effects and most background services.
# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache
available
Mem: 3831 1289 1141 49
1400 2305
Swap: 6696 0 6696
It's currently running konversation and guvcview for a camera, but I've
used
firefox on it too. Firefox is slow, but not unusable.
I use it mainly for konversation so I can do things on my main desktop
system
while discussing things in irc.
I have some spare sd cards just in case and keep regular backups on my main system. I've been running it with the same sd card since Feb. 2021.
The sd cards are in packages labeled Lexar high-performance 633x
microSDHC UHS-I.
I have no idea if that does wear leveling.
The rpi 4b has much better performance than I expected given that it's
using
an sd card. I was going to try xfce4 with it, but after seeing it's performance
decided to try kde plasma.
Using something like f2fs would probably be better, but ext4 is working
fine for
me. Knock on wood. :-)
Regards, Dave Hodgins
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 03/08/2023 10:43, Pancho wrote:
OK, I remember looking at this back in December and coming to the
conclusion it was hopeless. Micro SD cards (probably) don't do
active wear levelling + I wasn't clear what IO actually killed them.
I seem to remember, someone suggesting it was the EXT4 journal file
that was the problem rather than logs.
That is a slightly terrifying thought...does anyone have any more
information?
Mm. It would seem that while journalling multiplies the number of
writes, it wont impact what amounts to a read-only or 'write very
rarely' filesystem.
The problem with the ext4 journal and a SD card /without wear leveling/
is the journal is in a fixed location on the disk, so any write
anywhere that is journaled also becomes a write onto the journal area
of the disk. So the flash cells underlying the area of the journal see
far more writes than the rest of the cells, and wear out sooner.
Now, *with wear leveling* those journal writes that are logically to
the same blocks on the disk get spread all over the flash cells via the
wear leveling controller, mitigating the issue of a lot of writes
happening to the same blocks on the disk. The write amplification
issue is still present in any case.
But agreed, as you've reduced the number of writes to a bare minimum,
you likely won't need to worry about whether your sd card has, or does
not have, a wear leveling controller. Few to zero writes means little
to no wear.
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single
file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large blocks
1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block, writing a new one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum
reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
For many things Pi is too much power, much can be done with a simple PIC 18F14K22
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/pic/index.html
take scope_pic or freq_pic from that site.
*IF* you like to code in asm :-)
Only milli-amps curent consumption
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/pic/gm_pic2/
So much bloat these days just to say 'hello world'
I designed a ram disk for the Z80, wrote a CP/M clone too
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/z80/system14/diagrams/index.html
On 03/08/2023 07:44, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The NaturalRestarts are not a problem really. the whole central heating system dies
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple
battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
when the power goes out anyway.
If I wanted to run through that I'd UPS the whole damned thing.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum
reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
So much bloat these days just to say 'hello world'
no argument there. Was there even at the time of MSDOS. I once traced
through the code that ran when you hit a key on the keyboard. Thousands
of instructions
I designed a ram disk for the Z80, wrote a CP/M clone tooNeat stuff
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/z80/system14/diagrams/index.html
On 8/3/23 2:44 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple battery circuit
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power goes out. >>
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
I remember the "battery hat" - still sold :
https://www.waveshare.com/li-ion-battery-hat.htm
But MOST Pi's, because of the high power consumption,
still run off the mains - so a UPS is probably the
simplest option. The "battery hat" however might
serve to deal with very short interruptions.
However I don't think the most stress to SD cards
is on boot - but during regular USE ... the usual
data churning and loading system apps from the
card. If "ping" is used, well, where does it COME
from on a PI ? The SD card. Each application has
to be examined to see what routines are used and
put them into a RAMdisk or whatever. Remember,
even reading an SD card involves re-writing the
thing, that's how the tech works.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum
reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
I dunno how fast an SSD with a USB interface would be compared with a
SATA, but if I was using a pi for user level stuff, I'd want some kind
of SSD in there with the SD card only there to boot the thing.
My impressions is that a Pi is about as fast as a 486 used to be. or
maybe a bit more. Many people say the latest Pi is pentium 4 level or thereabouts.
For me that leads to a sort of tentative conclusions - if I want a busy server, or user desktop, I'd pick a late model Pi and USB boot it. If I
want an embedded device, I'd pick an SD card and tune the OS not to use
it, if possible.
On 03/08/2023 07:44, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The NaturalRestarts are not a problem really. the whole central heating system dies
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple
battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
when the power goes out anyway.
If I wanted to run through that I'd UPS the whole damned thing.
Its simply a natural habit to ensure than whatever an embedded system
does is the minimum necessary to get the job done with the maximum
reliability.
The SD card looks like it might be the weakest link. So I am trying to
reduce stress on it.
So much bloat these days just to say 'hello world'
no argument there. Was there even at the time of MSDOS. I once traced
through the code that ran when you hit a key on the keyboard. Thousands
of instructions
I designed a ram disk for the Z80, wrote a CP/M clone tooNeat stuff
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/z80/system14/diagrams/index.html
On 8/3/23 2:44 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple
battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
I remember the "battery hat" - still sold :
https://www.waveshare.com/li-ion-battery-hat.htm
But MOST Pi's, because of the high power consumption,
still run off the mains - so a UPS is probably the
simplest option. The "battery hat" however might
serve to deal with very short interruptions.
However I don't think the most stress to SD cards
is on boot - but during regular USE ... the usual
data churning and loading system apps from the
card. If "ping" is used, well, where does it COME
from on a PI ? The SD card. Each application has
to be examined to see what routines are used and
put them into a RAMdisk or whatever. Remember,
even reading an SD card involves re-writing the
thing, that's how the tech works.
Used to do ASM on micro-controllers, but over the past
decade the better 'C' compilers are actually smarter,
can do the same in even fewer bytes/cycles than most
human-writ code. Not by a HUGE margin, but, on tiny
devices, maybe enough.
On Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:29:31 -0400, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
I dunno how fast an SSD with a USB interface would be compared with a
SATA, but if I was using a pi for user level stuff, I'd want some kind
of SSD in there with the SD card only there to boot the thing.
sd cards are a lot cheaper. :-)
My impressions is that a Pi is about as fast as a 486 used to be. or
maybe a bit more. Many people say the latest Pi is pentium 4 level or
thereabouts.
This is an rpi 4b, which is a quad core (1 thread per core) and 4GB ram.
lscpu shows 108.0 BogoMIPS, while my desktop system with an AMD FX(tm)-4170 Quad-Core Processor from 2012 shows 8428.66 BoboMIPS.
Despite the low number of BogoMIPS, I'm still impressed by it overall.
It's fine for running the few applications I use it for.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I am not sure it actually does. If you turn off 'last read' with 'noatime' Which you surely would if you cared enough
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the spinning
rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works.
So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot might
be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot. I believe with later PIs you
can boot the whole thing from USB/SSD or rust.
On 04/08/2023 04:15, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:29:31 -0400, The Natural Philosopher
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
I dunno how fast an SSD with a USB interface would be compared with a
SATA, but if I was using a pi for user level stuff, I'd want some kind
of SSD in there with the SD card only there to boot the thing.
sd cards are a lot cheaper. :-)
But like a bicycle compared to a Ferrari, they are a lot slower, too
SSD simply flies.
My impressions is that a Pi is about as fast as a 486 used to be. or
maybe a bit more. Many people say the latest Pi is pentium 4 level or
thereabouts.
This is an rpi 4b, which is a quad core (1 thread per core) and 4GB ram.
lscpu shows 108.0 BogoMIPS, while my desktop system with an AMD FX(tm)-4170 >> Quad-Core Processor from 2012 shows 8428.66 BoboMIPS.
Despite the low number of BogoMIPS, I'm still impressed by it overall.
It's fine for running the few applications I use it for.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
Pi Zero W: BogoMIPS: 697.95
My desktop - refurbed HP: BogoMIPS: 5399.81
But it makes no sense - my old server which is nowher as fast show s
more bogomips
On 03/08/2023 23:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100Indeed.
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single
file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large blocks
1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block, writing a
new
one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the spinning
rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works.
So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot might
be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot.
I believe with later PIs you
can boot the whole thing from USB/SSD or rust.
For me that leads to a sort of tentative conclusions - if I want a busy server, or user desktop, I'd pick a late model Pi and USB boot it. If I
want an embedded device, I'd pick an SD card and tune the OS not to use
it, if possible.
And for serious storage, the later OS supports SATA hats...
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Aug 2023 09:57:30 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uaiehq$170d6$6@dont-email.me>:
On 04/08/2023 04:15, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:29:31 -0400, The Natural Philosopher
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
I dunno how fast an SSD with a USB interface would be compared with a
SATA, but if I was using a pi for user level stuff, I'd want some kind >>>> of SSD in there with the SD card only there to boot the thing.
sd cards are a lot cheaper. :-)
But like a bicycle compared to a Ferrari, they are a lot slower, too
SSD simply flies.
My impressions is that a Pi is about as fast as a 486 used to be. or
maybe a bit more. Many people say the latest Pi is pentium 4 level or
thereabouts.
This is an rpi 4b, which is a quad core (1 thread per core) and 4GB ram. >>>
lscpu shows 108.0 BogoMIPS, while my desktop system with an AMD FX(tm)-4170 >>> Quad-Core Processor from 2012 shows 8428.66 BoboMIPS.
Despite the low number of BogoMIPS, I'm still impressed by it overall.
It's fine for running the few applications I use it for.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
Pi Zero W: BogoMIPS: 697.95
My desktop - refurbed HP: BogoMIPS: 5399.81
But it makes no sense - my old server which is nowher as fast show s
more bogomips
My Pi4 8GB I am posting this from says:
raspberrypi: ~ # while [ 1 ] ; do cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep BogoMIPS ; sleep 1 ; done
BogoMIPS : 216.00
BogoMIPS : 324.00
BogoMIPS : 324.00
BogoMIPS : 324.00
BogoMIPS : 324.00
BogoMIPS : 144.00
BogoMIPS : 144.00
BogoMIPS : 144.00
BogoMIPS : 144.00
BogoMIPS : 180.00
BogoMIPS : 180.00
BogoMIPS : 180.00
BogoMIPS : 180.00
BogoMIPS : 198.00
raspberrypi: ~ # lscpu
Architecture: armv7l
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
Vendor ID: ARM
Model: 3
Model name: Cortex-A72
Stepping: r0p3
CPU max MHz: 1800.0000
CPU min MHz: 600.0000
BogoMIPS: 126.00
??
And my core i5 laptop says:
4788.51
runs an old Slackware version
So much for BogoMIPS
:-)
I am not sure it actually does. If you turn off 'last read' with 'noatime' Which you surely would if you cared enough
So much for BogoMIPS
But like a bicycle compared to a Ferrari, they are a lot slower, too
SSD simply flies.
On 04/08/2023 04:15, David W. Hodgins wrote:
lscpu shows 108.0 BogoMIPS, while my desktop system with an AMD FX(tm)-4170 >> Quad-Core Processor from 2012 shows 8428.66 BoboMIPS.
Despite the low number of BogoMIPS, I'm still impressed by it overall.
It's fine for running the few applications I use it for.
Pi Zero W: BogoMIPS: 697.95
My desktop - refurbed HP: BogoMIPS: 5399.81
But it makes no sense - my old server which is nowher as fast show s
more bogomips
My impressions is that a Pi is about as fast as a 486 used to be.
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
On 04/08/2023 03:38, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 03/08/2023 23:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100Indeed.
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single
file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large blocks >>> 1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block, writing
a new
one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the spinning
rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works.
So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot
might be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W
everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot.
That's what I do
My cmdline.txt:
console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=72020302-c396-2148-9d13-caf4f68cd18c rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 usbhid.mousepoll=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0
The PARTUUID is that of half a 120Gb SSD (/dev/sda2). /boot is on a
250Mb SD card.
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, so did I. I was assembly programming 8086s then - writing BIOS
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
And I *did* find many uses for that info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4
BogoMIPS on ARM is known to show incorrect results. The CPU tricks
the routine that Linux uses to calculate it, so at least it's
meaningless compared to the number given on architectures like x86,
or actual Million Instructions Per Second. Somehow the Linux
developers haven't been able to fix this.
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
On 04/08/2023 11:54, Chris Elvidge wrote:
On 04/08/2023 03:38, The Natural Philosopher wrote:That seems a logical best solution for an early Pi. The later ones will
On 03/08/2023 23:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100Indeed.
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single
file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large blocks >>>> 1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block, writing
a new
one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the
spinning rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works.
So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot
might be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W
everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot.
That's what I do
My cmdline.txt:
console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=72020302-c396-2148-9d13-caf4f68cd18c
rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash
plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0
usbhid.mousepoll=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0
The PARTUUID is that of half a 120Gb SSD (/dev/sda2). /boot is on a
250Mb SD card.
do USB boot, I think.
(where on earth did you get a 250MB SD card: I cant find anything much
less than gigabytes these days)
On 5 Aug 2023 10:17:23 +1000
not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) wrote:
BogoMIPS on ARM is known to show incorrect results. The CPU tricks
the routine that Linux uses to calculate it, so at least it's
meaningless compared to the number given on architectures like x86,
or actual Million Instructions Per Second. Somehow the Linux
developers haven't been able to fix this.
MIPs was a pretty useless concept long before Linux appeared.
On 5 Aug 2023 10:17:23 +1000
not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) wrote:
BogoMIPS on ARM is known to show incorrect results. The CPU tricks
the routine that Linux uses to calculate it, so at least it's
meaningless compared to the number given on architectures like x86,
or actual Million Instructions Per Second. Somehow the Linux
developers haven't been able to fix this.
MIPs was a pretty useless concept long before Linux appeared.
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is time
to buy a new PC.
On 2023-08-05, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
MIPs was a pretty useless concept long before Linux appeared.
Hence the acronym: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed.
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is time
to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make
them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
On 05/08/2023 08:56, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2023 11:54, Chris Elvidge wrote:
On 04/08/2023 03:38, The Natural Philosopher wrote:That seems a logical best solution for an early Pi. The later ones
On 03/08/2023 23:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100Indeed.
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single >>>>>> file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large
blocks
1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block,
writing a new
one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the
spinning rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works. >>>> So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot
might be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W
everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot.
That's what I do
My cmdline.txt:
console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=72020302-c396-2148-9d13-caf4f68cd18c
rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash
plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0
usbhid.mousepoll=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0
The PARTUUID is that of half a 120Gb SSD (/dev/sda2). /boot is on a
250Mb SD card.
will do USB boot, I think.
(where on earth did you get a 250MB SD card: I cant find anything much
less than gigabytes these days)
Seems the place I got them from is now out-of-stock on all SD cards.
On 05/08/2023 08:56, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2023 11:54, Chris Elvidge wrote:
On 04/08/2023 03:38, The Natural Philosopher wrote:That seems a logical best solution for an early Pi. The later ones
On 03/08/2023 23:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 23:28:06 +0100Indeed.
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@Proton.Me> wrote:
I guessed that the worry was that the journal was a smallish single >>>>>> file, used as a circular buffer (maybe 128MB). So, without wear
levelling, the same few blocks would be getting hit all the time.
Remember write amplification - flash storage uses very large
blocks
1MB or more so small writes involve copying most of a block,
writing a new
one with the changes and queing the old one to be wiped.
Oddly enough my SSD drives seem to be lasting better than the
spinning rust they replaced. The wear levelling in THOSE really works. >>>> So my tentative feeling at this point in time is that while /boot
might be on the SD card, if I were to use a pi for serious R/W
everything else would be an SSD mounted somehow at boot.
That's what I do
My cmdline.txt:
console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=72020302-c396-2148-9d13-caf4f68cd18c
rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash
plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0
usbhid.mousepoll=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0
The PARTUUID is that of half a 120Gb SSD (/dev/sda2). /boot is on a
250Mb SD card.
will do USB boot, I think.
(where on earth did you get a 250MB SD card: I cant find anything much
less than gigabytes these days)
Seems the place I got them from is now out-of-stock on all SD cards.
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 17:57:32 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Pretty much yes. And of course discs removed and replaced with SSDs.
Corporate discs automatically go to the crusher.
IME they don't even leave the office with the PCs, the IT
department removes them and puts them in the box to go to the crusher.
Pretty much yes. And of course discs removed and replaced with SSDs. Corporate discs automatically go to the crusher.
On 05/08/2023 18:19, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 17:57:32 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Pretty much yes. And of course discs removed and replaced with SSDs.
Corporate discs automatically go to the crusher.
IME they don't even leave the office with the PCs, the IT
department removes them and puts them in the box to go to the crusher.
Usually some contract firm doing the IT upgrade does that.
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 18:48:48 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 05/08/2023 18:19, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 17:57:32 +0100Usually some contract firm doing the IT upgrade does that.
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Pretty much yes. And of course discs removed and replaced with SSDs.
Corporate discs automatically go to the crusher.
IME they don't even leave the office with the PCs, the IT
department removes them and puts them in the box to go to the crusher.
Probably depends on the size of the IT department - the last place
I saw it happen was Yahoo! where internal staff did it.
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make
them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
On 05/08/2023 19:16, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 18:48:48 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Usually some contract firm doing the IT upgrade does that.
Probably depends on the size of the IT department - the last
place I saw it happen was Yahoo! where internal staff did it.
A relative was (contract) managing projects like this for IBM. Who
All the machines I have bought came with brand new SSD drives and a
fresh install of WinShit, which I promptly erased as soon as Linux was installed.
I had a further look, as its a dull wet day and its bloody cold for
summer, and in fact you are hard pressed to even find a card under 1GB
at all, and they are not the cheapest.
On 05/08/2023 05:20, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, so did I. I was assembly programming 8086s then - writing BIOS
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
And I *did* find many uses for that info.
extensions or complete BIOSES for them,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4
Or interfacing with special hardware people had built that needed
drivers written.
But that line of business dried up, so I ended up doing yet another
career shift into running IT businesses.
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 20:28:24 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 05/08/2023 19:16, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 18:48:48 +0100A relative was (contract) managing projects like this for IBM. Who
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Usually some contract firm doing the IT upgrade does that.
Probably depends on the size of the IT department - the last
place I saw it happen was Yahoo! where internal staff did it.
Figures, Yahoo! was busy going down the pan at the time there's no
way they'd be springing for the kind of services IBM would use.
All the machines I have bought came with brand new SSD drives and a
fresh install of WinShit, which I promptly erased as soon as Linux was
installed.
Yep - it costs them next to nothing to put it on there. For me it's FreeBSD that gets to install itself over the whole disc. It's been failing
to annoy me for thirty years now, I've yet to encounter a Linux that lasted
a month without annoying me. There's a Linux VM lurking for a couple of slicer applications that I can't be bothered to try and make run under FreeBSD's compatibility layer.
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
I had a further look, as its a dull wet day and its bloody cold for
summer, and in fact you are hard pressed to even find a card under 1GB
at all, and they are not the cheapest.
Unless you buy used cards on Ebay from people who pull them out of
old phones. I got a bunch of 16GB cards that way and most have
worked well. One was toast. The smallest ones, 128MB or 64MB, are
usually cheapest from those sellers.
On 8/5/23 4:01 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 05/08/2023 05:20, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, so did I. I was assembly programming 8086s then - writing BIOS
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
And I *did* find many uses for that info.
extensions or complete BIOSES for them,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4
Shoulda gone with the Frenchies, they LOVE nuke ! :-)
Never went as far as a full BIOS. Leveraging what IS,
what's commercial, what's widespread and "standard"
was generally my approach. In the time it takes to
write a BIOS, esp solo, I could do ten times the stuff
with my approach.
But to each ...
Or interfacing with special hardware people had built that needed
drivers written.
But that line of business dried up, so I ended up doing yet another
career shift into running IT businesses.
Once you COULD buy lots of neat stuff off the shelf,
then yea, a focus shift made sense. Never tried/wanted
to RUN businesses though - massive pain in the ass and
biz WAY too often winds up in the shitter.
Was still programming in solder into maybe half a
dozen years ago - stuff you couldn't, or wouldn't,
buy off the shelf. However that stuff was for
microcontrollers, not real CPUs.
On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Aug 2023 21:14:45 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote in <uame45$1ntb9$3@dont-email.me>:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote: >>>
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make >>> them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are >>> cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks (bog
standard WD 500MB blue) since then. Last April it collapsed in a heap and
was replaced with a new system with a Ryzen 3 43006 chip: 500 GB RAM and
500 GB M2 SSD. I also took the opportunity to replace my slow ADSL house
connection with a FTTC fibre link.
The difference has been dramatic: the new system cold boots in 41 secs
(from hitting the 'on' button until the Login' prompt appears). I have
password protection on the M2 SSD so this includes the time needed to
enter the SSD password.
Weekly backups (by rsync to a local 3.5" WD Essentials USB drive is at
least 5 times faster. Similarly, The weekly Fedora dnf-managed package
update that follows it is now getting read at 4.2 Mb/sec rather than the
480 kB/sec I used to get over ADSL on a good day and the step that follows >> the backup and update: running rkhunter also shows a similar speedup.
I used to put PCs together myself, mother board, PCI card, etc
I have still 2 PCs.
the first one is > 20 years old and runs GRML Linux, is an AMD system
its working upstairs and has a ton of software I wrote and a PCI satellite reception card
so I sometimes use it to do things like dish positioning:
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/satellite/
Am radio ham too and we have now QO100 geostationary satellite for example to send an receive from.
Am not very active as where I live now it requires climbing high ladders to reach the dish...
The other PC is > 10 years old and had an LG M-DISC drive so I can burn DVDs and blu-rays etc too.
But it had a bad crash after some mains power dip, so put old Slackware on it and some of my DVD
soft I wrote...
Not used much now if at all, was also put together myself
My Samsung laptop is from 2011 or so and for 'on the go', Huawei 4G stick internet everywhere.,
and I have 5 Raspberries, 2 of those are Pi4, for daily use.
3 are now on 24/7 on a UPS, one I post this from, one records security cams and plays background music if needed,
records weather, air traffic ship traffic, radiation all to a 4 TB Toshiba USB disk.
One runs as server.
I think I will not buy / construct a new PC.
My Samsung TV (also 20 years old ) can play HD from the 1 TB harddisk I have plugged in it.
and I can record anything I can receive from satellite or DVB-T2 terrestrial with the 30 Euro or so cheap boxes
from ebay with 128 GB USB sticks plugged into it.
Why need more computer power?
To have the bloat say 'hello there?'
It is a conspiracy, make a more bloated OS, sell more hardware that needs it? Need a faster network to do the ever bigger updates?
The news remains the same.
Ever higher TV resolution? Buy a new TV set ever 10, 5, 2 ?? LOL years? Games? I have Xmahjong ... Programming is more fun..
Now they want to replace cash with digital money it seems.....
Just wait for the next big solar storm or high altitude nuke and that is all it needs
to kill all sats and electricity and back to barter trade...
if there is anything like food left to trade, as fridges need electricity too.
We should NOT become too dependent on electricity, electric cars and all that,
only diversity can keep us alive, we should not forget those skills.
I have some good solar panels stuff and a 250 AH lifepo4 battery pack and a 12V to 230V converter so I can at least
cook food or maybe even keep a fridge running when the WW3 str// power is out for a short while...
hehe
On 06/08/2023 05:01, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/5/23 4:01 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:I was being paid to get custom designed hardware to perform.
On 05/08/2023 05:20, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, so did I. I was assembly programming 8086s then - writing BIOS
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
And I *did* find many uses for that info.
extensions or complete BIOSES for them,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4
Shoulda gone with the Frenchies, they LOVE nuke ! :-)
Never went as far as a full BIOS. Leveraging what IS,
what's commercial, what's widespread and "standard"
was generally my approach. In the time it takes to
write a BIOS, esp solo, I could do ten times the stuff
with my approach.
But to each ...
This minicomputer company wanted an 8088 board to control the other
boards in their super fault tolerant computer. So there it was, a bare
8088 board with PROm and some RAM and they wanted to be able to load
code from an 8" floppy, and drive a serial monitor, oh and while you are
at it, write us a full C library in ROM and an FORTH interpreter -
here's the source code in a 150 page scan of some magazine article.
That's 6 months of my life I wont get back. They were going to write a >multitasking basic operating system on top of that but my contract
expired before they got that far.
No option. No one wanted a 43 year old self taught programmer. They
Or interfacing with special hardware people had built that needed
drivers written.
But that line of business dried up, so I ended up doing yet another
career shift into running IT businesses.
Once you COULD buy lots of neat stuff off the shelf,
then yea, a focus shift made sense. Never tried/wanted
to RUN businesses though - massive pain in the ass and
biz WAY too often winds up in the shitter.
wanted bushy tailed youngsters who wrote C++ and had been schooled in
all sorts of theoretical shit that enabled them to justify writing
shitty bug filled code.
When no one is offering jobs, it sensible to invent your own. It
started as technical support, but as it became apparent that the other
people in the business hadn't a clue how to actually run a business - >accounts, operations, technical support and so on, I ended up running
more than half the employees.
I needed a job, and that was the only way I could guarantee the business >didn't fall to pieces with incompetence.
Well it fell to pieces with ego, so a couple of us started another one,
and I ended up running most of that too.
When I had enough cash accumulated, and my co directors wife started
trashing the business, we sold it and I gave up work altogether.
I'd frankly had enough. So I retired at 50.
Was still programming in solder into maybe half a
dozen years ago - stuff you couldn't, or wouldn't,
buy off the shelf. However that stuff was for
microcontrollers, not real CPUs.
I still solder stuff together. And I will be for this current Pi project
too. I need an internal mains power supply for the server - to hell with
USB wall warts - and I need a special bit of kit that turns on after up
to an hours delay, boots a pico and runs it until the PICO has done its
stuff and issues a shutdown signal on a GPIO pin, and puts the whole
thing to sleep at a couple of µA or so for up to an hour, to get a
decent battery life.
Oddly enough the best solution to that looks to be not some specialised >complex chip, but an old school simple 4000 series CMOS Schmitt
trigger, some Rs and Cs, and three boring old school transistors. 1970s >technology in fact.
In quiescent state, the only current draw will be leakage current on the >transistors charge current on the timing capacitor and the quiescent
current of the CMOS Schmitt, which at 4.5v is less than a µA...the best
I could do with clever chips like a CMOS 555 timer was around 16µA.
If it works I might get some PCBS made up for that. Lots of people might
want a PICO for use as a remote sensor on batteries on an 'occasional'
basis.
So old school it is. I am hoping for at least a years battery life on
the oil tank sensor. Even if that means only monitoring the level once
an hour or less.
On 06/08/2023 06:31, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Aug 2023 21:14:45 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin
Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote in <uame45$1ntb9$3@dont-email.me>: >>
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote: >>>>
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make >>>> them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are >>>> cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks (bog >>> standard WD 500MB blue) since then. Last April it collapsed in a heap and >>> was replaced with a new system with a Ryzen 3 43006 chip: 500 GB RAM and >>> 500 GB M2 SSD. I also took the opportunity to replace my slow ADSL house >>> connection with a FTTC fibre link.
The difference has been dramatic: the new system cold boots in 41 secs
(from hitting the 'on' button until the Login' prompt appears). I have
password protection on the M2 SSD so this includes the time needed to
enter the SSD password.
Weekly backups (by rsync to a local 3.5" WD Essentials USB drive is at
least 5 times faster. Similarly, The weekly Fedora dnf-managed package
update that follows it is now getting read at 4.2 Mb/sec rather than the >>> 480 kB/sec I used to get over ADSL on a good day and the step that follows >>> the backup and update: running rkhunter also shows a similar speedup.
I used to put PCs together myself, mother board, PCI card, etc
I have still 2 PCs.
the first one is > 20 years old and runs GRML Linux, is an AMD system
its working upstairs and has a ton of software I wrote and a PCI satellite reception card
so I sometimes use it to do things like dish positioning:
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/satellite/
Am radio ham too and we have now QO100 geostationary satellite for example to send an receive from.
Am not very active as where I live now it requires climbing high ladders to reach the dish...
The other PC is > 10 years old and had an LG M-DISC drive so I can burn DVDs and blu-rays etc too.
But it had a bad crash after some mains power dip, so put old Slackware on it and some of my DVD
soft I wrote...
Not used much now if at all, was also put together myself
My Samsung laptop is from 2011 or so and for 'on the go', Huawei 4G stick internet everywhere.,
and I have 5 Raspberries, 2 of those are Pi4, for daily use.
3 are now on 24/7 on a UPS, one I post this from, one records security cams and plays background music if needed,
records weather, air traffic ship traffic, radiation all to a 4 TB Toshiba USB disk.
One runs as server.
I think I will not buy / construct a new PC.
My Samsung TV (also 20 years old ) can play HD from the 1 TB harddisk I have plugged in it.
and I can record anything I can receive from satellite or DVB-T2 terrestrial with the 30 Euro or so cheap boxes
from ebay with 128 GB USB sticks plugged into it.
Why need more computer power?
To have the bloat say 'hello there?'
It is a conspiracy, make a more bloated OS, sell more hardware that needs it?
Need a faster network to do the ever bigger updates?
The news remains the same.
Ever higher TV resolution? Buy a new TV set ever 10, 5, 2 ?? LOL years?
Games? I have Xmahjong ... Programming is more fun..
Now they want to replace cash with digital money it seems.....
Just wait for the next big solar storm or high altitude nuke and that is all it needs
to kill all sats and electricity and back to barter trade...
if there is anything like food left to trade, as fridges need electricity too.
We should NOT become too dependent on electricity, electric cars and all that,
only diversity can keep us alive, we should not forget those skills.
I have some good solar panels stuff and a 250 AH lifepo4 battery pack and a 12V to 230V converter so I can at least
cook food or maybe even keep a fridge running when the WW3 str// power is out for a short while...
hehe
It's amazing how much of the modern up to date utterly fashionable
technology one finds one neither needs nor wants.
I had a 'Damascene' moment sitting in the sun, roasting some meat on a
braai, in a game park in South Africa watching some hippos and
crocodiles (fortunately the other side of a river), when I realised that
all of civilisation is there really simply to keep us warm and put food
on the table and give us somewhere safe to sleep at night, and the rest
is simply there because we get bored.
Well, I have a place to sleep safely at night, and mostly warm and
always have food.
I'll settle for that, and as to getting bored - what were computers and
the internet invented for if not to allow access to all sorts of weird
shit?
(I know, they were both invented, like integrated circuits, to fight
wars with. Hey ho).
On a sunny day (Sun, 6 Aug 2023 08:51:31 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uanje4$25fvd$1@dont-email.me>:
On 06/08/2023 05:01, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/5/23 4:01 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:I was being paid to get custom designed hardware to perform.
On 05/08/2023 05:20, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/4/23 4:58 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:Oh, so did I. I was assembly programming 8086s then - writing BIOS
On 04/08/2023 07:03, 23k.304 wrote:
Still have the old IBM Technical Reference Manual.
All that stuff was meticulously documented.
I gave that away sometime in the late 80s.
I consider it to be a "valuable artifact" :-)
At minimum, it showed how serious and deep they'd
go with the early PCs. That's when programming was
still painfully "real". Mostly you could not buy
what you needed - so you had to make it yourself.
And I *did* find many uses for that info.
extensions or complete BIOSES for them,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4
Shoulda gone with the Frenchies, they LOVE nuke ! :-)
Never went as far as a full BIOS. Leveraging what IS,
what's commercial, what's widespread and "standard"
was generally my approach. In the time it takes to
write a BIOS, esp solo, I could do ten times the stuff
with my approach.
But to each ...
This minicomputer company wanted an 8088 board to control the other
boards in their super fault tolerant computer. So there it was, a bare
8088 board with PROm and some RAM and they wanted to be able to load
code from an 8" floppy, and drive a serial monitor, oh and while you are
at it, write us a full C library in ROM and an FORTH interpreter -
here's the source code in a 150 page scan of some magazine article.
That's 6 months of my life I wont get back. They were going to write a
multitasking basic operating system on top of that but my contract
expired before they got that far.
No option. No one wanted a 43 year old self taught programmer. They
Or interfacing with special hardware people had built that needed
drivers written.
But that line of business dried up, so I ended up doing yet another
career shift into running IT businesses.
Once you COULD buy lots of neat stuff off the shelf,
then yea, a focus shift made sense. Never tried/wanted
to RUN businesses though - massive pain in the ass and
biz WAY too often winds up in the shitter.
wanted bushy tailed youngsters who wrote C++ and had been schooled in
all sorts of theoretical shit that enabled them to justify writing
shitty bug filled code.
When no one is offering jobs, it sensible to invent your own. It
started as technical support, but as it became apparent that the other
people in the business hadn't a clue how to actually run a business -
accounts, operations, technical support and so on, I ended up running
more than half the employees.
I needed a job, and that was the only way I could guarantee the business
didn't fall to pieces with incompetence.
Well it fell to pieces with ego, so a couple of us started another one,
and I ended up running most of that too.
When I had enough cash accumulated, and my co directors wife started
trashing the business, we sold it and I gave up work altogether.
I'd frankly had enough. So I retired at 50.
I had a TV repair shop for years during the late seventies and early eighties.
Worked for the national TV network here before that
and before that designed electronics for the among other things army and navy.
After the repair shop did many things, often via agencies.
Electronics is everywhere so gained knowledge of a lot of fields
from missiles to medical (worked in a university hospital too) and space and physics (accelerator).
Curiosity is likely what drives me.
Was still programming in solder into maybe half a
dozen years ago - stuff you couldn't, or wouldn't,
buy off the shelf. However that stuff was for
microcontrollers, not real CPUs.
I still solder stuff together. And I will be for this current Pi project
too. I need an internal mains power supply for the server - to hell with
USB wall warts - and I need a special bit of kit that turns on after up
to an hours delay, boots a pico and runs it until the PICO has done its
stuff and issues a shutdown signal on a GPIO pin, and puts the whole
thing to sleep at a couple of µA or so for up to an hour, to get a
decent battery life.
Oddly enough the best solution to that looks to be not some specialised
complex chip, but an old school simple 4000 series CMOS Schmitt
trigger, some Rs and Cs, and three boring old school transistors. 1970s
technology in fact.
In quiescent state, the only current draw will be leakage current on the
transistors charge current on the timing capacitor and the quiescent
current of the CMOS Schmitt, which at 4.5v is less than a µA...the best
I could do with clever chips like a CMOS 555 timer was around 16µA.
If it works I might get some PCBS made up for that. Lots of people might
want a PICO for use as a remote sensor on batteries on an 'occasional'
basis.
So old school it is. I am hoping for at least a years battery life on
the oil tank sensor. Even if that means only monitoring the level once
an hour or less.
I have done a fluid level sensor with just a 4040 counter and an echo system 555 timer, sending a beep down to the surface and counting ticks before the echo returns
Was in the eighties.
Distance sensors are now less than 2 Euro or on ebay..
https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/ultrasonic-distance-sensor/bn_7024750003
done a lot of experiments with those ebay things too, for example wind speed measurements:
http://panteltje.nl/pub/wind_speed_by_differential_2_ebay_distance_meters_IMG_4891.JPG
http://panteltje.nl/pub/44kHz_radar_time_of_flight_test_in_wind_tunnel_IMG_4105.JPG
But am from origin electronics hardware, programming came later..
I do not always see the need for any Raspberry stuff in equipment, I use Microchip 18F14K22 chips
that I program in asm.
Those have ADCs, PWM generators, a simple DAC, counters, etc etc and sleep mode with only nano amps.
For an other e dollars or so you can add an USB interface.
For the 'network' its a bit more complicated, I need an extra chip
As the ebay modules are so cheap who cares .
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285358235060
PICs can drive a nice OLED or LCD display no problem:
http://panteltje.nl/pub/gamma_spectrometer_plus_probe_plus_geiger_counter_2_IMG_4185.JPG
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/pic/scope_pic/
Only external code I use is the 32 bit PIC asm math routines written by somebody else.
No emulators no debuggers used ever.
serial port and a scope is all I need.
No million dollar scope, 10 MHz dual trace is enough.
ASM is easy,
C is OK.
The rest I do not want to know about ;-)
Seems these day you can ask AI to write the code...
I wonder....
:-)
Bit more warming, mass migration, society as we know it may fall apart.
We may need to move / spread our species to other planets to protect civilization as we know it..
On 06/08/2023 10:04, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Bit more warming, mass migration, society as we know it may fall apart.Most societal collapses seem to occur because one resource or another
that is so fundamental to a societies existence, runs out or just stops
for natural reasons.
It might be water, a supply of fish, or anything. Today its energy. Our >society is utterly dependent on energy derived from coal oil and gas.
And the so called 'renewables' are no replacement for it.
Coal enabled the UK population to rise from 5-10 million to 50 million,
oil and gas has taken us to 70-80 million. No one knows, there are so
many illegal immigrants these days . Renewable energy will take us back
to 5 million - or probably less, as we do not have a pre-existent system
set up to achieve anything at all with say horses or oxen,
Nuclear might take us to 100 million. But no one seems to want that. I
think they prefer to die.
We may need to move / spread our species to other planets to protect civilization as we know it..
I don't think we 'need' to do anything. In a Godless world we find
Nature is supremely indifferent to our success or failure as a species.
What persists in this world is whatever lucks out and finds a *way* to >persist, for a time. As circumstances change, species change.
As a general species, we have become as unbelievably arrogant as we have >become unbelievably stupid. Or perhaps we always were, but civilization
now has been built by the clever few, us engineers, and the rest of the >population is simply incapable of understanding it or keeping it going,
and worse, doesn't even understand that their very lives depend on it.
We have built a society where even the most ill adapted and incompetent
can survive and prosper, and in that mood of compassion, have
inadvertently built a world full of people who are simply too stupid to
keep it going. And given them enough political power to destroy it.
Which they are doing.
Ah well. Darwin in action. We tried.
I won't live to see the worst of the collapse.
Its a shame. Id like to see all these unbelievably arrogant and stupid >people dying in screaming agony as the realisation dawns that everything
they were told or believed in was all a load of utter shit, and that no >matter how much they scream about their 'rights', and what the
government *ought* to be doing, there is simply no one left to give them
a single thought.
Life is rough, tough and desperately unjust. Life's a bitch, and then
you die.
It's a shame that these lessons are no longer taught.
Yes, when I see those 'save the world' activist glue themselves to
airport runways screwing up people's holidays...
And the way C used the stack to allocate temporary variable space to
remove the need for complex memory management or else global memory assignment was pure genius. I think that first appeared in ALGOL. It
allowed recursive functions to be simply coded.
Coal enabled the UK population to rise from 5-10 million to 50 million,
oil and gas has taken us to 70-80 million. No one knows, there are so
many illegal immigrants these days . Renewable energy will take us back
to 5 million - or probably less, as we do not have a pre-existent system
set up to achieve anything at all with say horses or oxen,
Nuclear might take us to 100 million. But no one seems to want that. I
think they prefer to die.
On Sun, 06 Aug 2023 12:33:58 GMT
Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
Yes, when I see those 'save the world' activist glue themselves to
airport runways screwing up people's holidays...
These people are idiots - they have no idea how much needs to be
done before we can stop burning oil, coal and gas - which we have no
choice about we have to do that well before it runs out otherwise we'll
never survive the energy wars.
Nobody is going to permit nuclear until far too late (it probably already is nuclear plants are not quick things to build) which leaves renewables as the only game in town - we *have* to make them work! It is physically possible to make them work given that we now have reliable flow battery designs, the rest is simply a matter of engineering much of it
civil!
If we're really lucky something better might turn up while we're at
it but we can't count on that or a sudden embracing of nuclear power - any engineer worth their salt knows you have to work with what you've got, it's no use wishing for what you can't have.
Teach them some technology, as technology is the only thing that is able
to keep us alive in the numbers we are now - when climate changes.
Most of them do not even know how to connect a light bulb.
Brainwashed by green fanatics.
On 06/08/2023 02:45, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>When you are looking at second hand SD cards plus postage, the cost
wrote:
benefit analyis told me I should pay the money for whatever was the
current best price on new stuff , with plenty of life left, from the
same shop that was shipping me the Pi. To leverage the postage. and that turns out to be 16GB. Why, I don't have a clue. I could ask an old
college friend who used to work designing NAND flash in California, but
I am not sure I give a rat's arse why.
Again, you asses a situation and what you want, and work out the least
cost and effort to arrive at that target. If I could get 2GB cards at 5
for £10 I'd use those, But I cant.
I was interested because I don't remember ever having an SD card for my ancient camera that was that small (256MB).
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make
them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are
cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks (bog standard WD 500MB blue) since then.
Nobody is going to permit nuclear until far too late (it probably already is nuclear plants are not quick things to build) which leaves renewables as the only game in town - we *have* to make them work!
It is physically possible to make them work given that we now have
reliable flow battery designs, the rest is simply a matter of
engineering much of it civil!
If we're really lucky something better might turn up while we'reat
it but we can't count on that or a sudden embracing of nuclear power -
any engineer worth their salt knows you have to work with what you've
got, it's no use wishing for what you can't have.
Yes: I've known about flow batteries for at least 20 years and they seem
like an ideal power source, so why aren't they in widespread use already?
Coal enabled the UK population to rise from 5-10 million to 50 million,
oil and gas has taken us to 70-80 million. No one knows, there are so
many illegal immigrants these days . Renewable energy will take us back
to 5 million - or probably less, as we do not have a pre-existent system
set up to achieve anything at all with say horses or oxen,
Nuclear might take us to 100 million. But no one seems to want that. I
think they prefer to die.
Its a shame. Id like to see all these unbelievably arrogant and stupid people dying in screaming agony as the realisation dawns that everything
they were told or believed in was all a load of utter shit, and that no matter how much they scream about their 'rights', and what the
government *ought* to be doing, there is simply no one left to give them
a single thought.
Life is rough, tough and desperately unjust. Life's a bitch, and then
you die.
It's a shame that these lessons are no longer taught.
On 04/08/2023 06:08, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/3/23 2:44 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:I am not sure it actually does. If you turn off 'last read' with 'noatime' Which you surely would if you cared enough
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in
<uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is,
the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple
battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
I remember the "battery hat" - still sold :
https://www.waveshare.com/li-ion-battery-hat.htm
But MOST Pi's, because of the high power consumption,
still run off the mains - so a UPS is probably the
simplest option. The "battery hat" however might
serve to deal with very short interruptions.
However I don't think the most stress to SD cards
is on boot - but during regular USE ... the usual
data churning and loading system apps from the
card. If "ping" is used, well, where does it COME
from on a PI ? The SD card. Each application has
to be examined to see what routines are used and
put them into a RAMdisk or whatever. Remember,
even reading an SD card involves re-writing the
thing, that's how the tech works.
Used to do ASM on micro-controllers, but over the past
decade the better 'C' compilers are actually smarter,
can do the same in even fewer bytes/cycles than most
human-writ code. Not by a HUGE margin, but, on tiny
devices, maybe enough.
Oh yes. The days of trying to write C that didn't turn into bloat on an
8 bit 6809...are long gone
I occasionally looked at .a files on *86, and they wrote better
assembler than I could.
So much so that I gave up looking.
ALGOL was originally a "demo", "proof of concept", not
intended for the real world. I seem to remember that the
Well, sort of "new concept" ... they had to cast it
in more conventional terms. A couple of images would
have made it MUCH more clear. Guess those were too
expensive :-) Nothing more useless than an attempted
TEXT DESCRIPTION of something best suited for a VISUAL
description.
Early back in the IBM/PC era there was a company that
was selling "un-copyable" floppy disks. Turned out the
trick was a tiny laser hole in the medium. Phillipe
Khan ("Borland") offered a BOUNTY for anyone who could
find a work-around. I seem to remember it was just a
couple of days. The disk-makers went out of biz.
Yep. Would have been very visually impressive !
Serious chess people tend to run in "higher" circles,
meaning more $$$. If you'd had a "beautiful" product
they WOULD have paid for it. Lower volume but higher
margins.
On 05/08/2023 22:14, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote: >>>
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make >>> them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which are >>> cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks (bog
standard WD 500MB blue) since then.
I think it all depends, what you want. If you don't already have a PC
less than 10 years old, then second-hand deals are good.
In most respects I found a 10-year-old 2500K, OK to use. Up until a
couple of years ago it was my desktop, then its graphics card broke, and
it got relegated to HTPC, it wasn't so good at that. I've just replaced
it with an Orange Pi 5, with caveats, the Orange Pi 5 is better as a TV computer. The Orange Pi 5 was cheap. I've also bought a couple of low
power new NUC types for about £200, for relatives, e.g. Intel N5150,
they are generally happy with them.
Mainly I've been interested in small low wattage PCs, it is only
recently that they have been quicker than my old 2500K. The new big
desktops were quick, but not that much quicker, maybe twice as fast, for
a reasonable price. Now, the Ryzen 5 7600 is looking to be 3-4 times as
fast, single thread, more than 3-4 multi thread. Which might be
noticeable, for me, I don't know. Without having one, it is hard to know.
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 10:34:22 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
The task is huge but it is not too huge - it can be expected to
take decades and it is already happening as fast as production can go. When flow battery electrode assemblies hit the DIY market things will really
be moving. I expect that within a decade followed by IBLCs getting hard to obtain.
Getting an EXACT voltage output from a little "hummer" supply
like that might be tricky. As said, it depends on what you're doing.
Oh, if you're powering direct from the mains, why CARE what
the quiescent current is ? That's more for battery/solar apps.
You could use a vacuum-tube based power supply 😄
What's really going to destroy us is the belief by many - especially
our ruling classes - that our population can and must increase
indefinitely. People cannot allow themselves to realize that there
are hard limits - for example, the entire planet being converted into
people, crawling over each other like a swarm of bees. If our population continues to double every 40 years, we'll reach that point in 1800 years.
A more realistic limit - one person for every square meter of dry land
on the planet - will be reached in only 600 years. But anyone with any
sense will realize that the crash will happen much sooner than that.
On 8/4/23 4:51 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2023 06:08, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/3/23 2:44 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:I am not sure it actually does. If you turn off 'last read' with
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The Natural >>>> Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in
<uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is, >>>>> the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a simple
battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
I remember the "battery hat" - still sold :
https://www.waveshare.com/li-ion-battery-hat.htm
But MOST Pi's, because of the high power consumption,
still run off the mains - so a UPS is probably the
simplest option. The "battery hat" however might
serve to deal with very short interruptions.
However I don't think the most stress to SD cards
is on boot - but during regular USE ... the usual
data churning and loading system apps from the
card. If "ping" is used, well, where does it COME
from on a PI ? The SD card. Each application has
to be examined to see what routines are used and
put them into a RAMdisk or whatever. Remember,
even reading an SD card involves re-writing the
thing, that's how the tech works.
'noatime'
Which you surely would if you cared enough
A right move ... but doesn't entirely solve the
SD-wear problem. System apps you're using a lot
really MUST be moved to RAMdisk. A certain amount
of the OS does wind up on its own RAMdisk, but
it might not be what YOU are using a lot.
Hey, Raspbian might be 2gb image on the SD card
but yer Pi, depending on model, might not have
much more RAM (or even LESS if it's a Pi-1/2).
As such the WHOLE OS cannot be put into RAM.
All the parts that can't, well, they get read
over and over from the SD.
On 06/08/2023 15:45, Pancho wrote:
On 05/08/2023 22:14, Martin Gregorie wrote:Its been a few years now, since I felt my machines were too slow for the
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
wrote:
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make >>>> them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which
are
cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks
(bog
standard WD 500MB blue) since then.
I think it all depends, what you want. If you don't already have a PC
less than 10 years old, then second-hand deals are good.
In most respects I found a 10-year-old 2500K, OK to use. Up until a
couple of years ago it was my desktop, then its graphics card broke,
and it got relegated to HTPC, it wasn't so good at that. I've just
replaced it with an Orange Pi 5, with caveats, the Orange Pi 5 is
better as a TV computer. The Orange Pi 5 was cheap. I've also bought a
couple of low power new NUC types for about £200, for relatives, e.g.
Intel N5150, they are generally happy with them.
Mainly I've been interested in small low wattage PCs, it is only
recently that they have been quicker than my old 2500K. The new big
desktops were quick, but not that much quicker, maybe twice as fast,
for a reasonable price. Now, the Ryzen 5 7600 is looking to be 3-4
times as fast, single thread, more than 3-4 multi thread. Which might
be noticeable, for me, I don't know. Without having one, it is hard to
know.
job they were doing.
I accept that people doing video editing or shooting up 3D aliens in
unlikely scenarios may need more, but I don't.
I am more replacing now to lower power consumption, although even that
is not 100% wasted as the computers heat this room in winter.
Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my companies.
There is not enough space for renewable ebergy AND humans AND farming
AND the as yet to be identified storage.
On 06/08/2023 14:41, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 10:34:22 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
The task is huge but it is not too huge - it can be expected to
take decades and it is already happening as fast as production can go.
When flow battery electrode assemblies hit the DIY market things will really be moving. I expect that within a decade followed by IBLCs
getting hard to obtain.
I wish I shared your optimism.
Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my companies.
On 06/08/2023 14:41, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 10:34:22 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
The task is huge but it is not too huge - it can be expected to
take decades and it is already happening as fast as production can go. When >> flow battery electrode assemblies hit the DIY market things will really
be moving. I expect that within a decade followed by IBLCs getting hard to >> obtain.
I wish I shared your optimism.
Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my >companies.
There is not enough space for renewable ebergy AND humans AND farming
AND the as yet to be identified storage. The whole heath robinsn
arrangement would uterly destroy the environment, bankrupt the nations >attempting it and still not create enough energy to replace itself in
twenty years.
Today we burn fossil to build renewables. That will not always be the case. >Simply put the implementation cost and the EROEI (enetrgy return over
energy invested) is so poor for renewables that it only takes one nation
to say 'sod this for a game of soldiers' and go 100% nuclear, and that
nation will rule the renewable peasants in their grass shacks forever.
I assumed that was Russia's plan, until the moron invaded Ukraine. Fund
the anti nuclear and anti-fracking and anti oil brigades, then sell
Germany gas on the QT to run the country off while the windmills
convinced people they were actually green, and then absorb or control a >Germany utterly dependent on Russian gas. And thereby essentially
control the EU.
The compiler-writers have become VERY VERY good.
Stuff I commonly wrote in ASM on u-controllers
is actually smaller/faster now using 'C'. That's
just IMPRESSIVE.
I occasionally looked at .a files on *86, and they wrote better
assembler than I could.
The old 'Dilbert' narrow-tie people WERE damned good.
Modern hardware with a lot more resources kind of
made them obsolete - any 10-year-old could write
adequate code then.
So much so that I gave up looking.
I went to 'C' and PASCAL early on. ASM became only
for a handful of very weird things neither did well
at the time.
On 07/08/2023 09:46, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my
companies.
Didn't we all? At least, those of us who had companies.
There is not enough space for renewable ebergy AND humans AND farming
AND the as yet to be identified storage.
The North Sea gives enough room for the needs of the UK.
It might be uneconomic, it might not, but that space could provide
enough power for the UK.
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
On Mon, 7 Aug 2023 09:46:40 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 06/08/2023 14:41, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 10:34:22 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
The task is huge but it is not too huge - it can be expected to
take decades and it is already happening as fast as production can go.
When flow battery electrode assemblies hit the DIY market things will
really be moving. I expect that within a decade followed by IBLCs
getting hard to obtain.
I wish I shared your optimism.
You have it backwards - I wish I shared *your* optimism.
You see you're right widespread adoption of nuclear power would
make things far easier if it was done well and in a timely fashion.
My problem is that I don't see any chance of the NIMBY brigade
being bypassed until long after it is far too late to build more than a tiny fraction of the necessary power stations.
Then of course it will be fast track, crash priority get them builtAlmost nothing. Even the worst ever reactor built - the Chernobyl style,
as fast as possible, oh please keep the costs down the budget is tight this year you know there's an election coming up. Why not buy a load of those new dirt cheap plants from <insert fourth world country here> that have just
hit the market.
What could possibly go wrong ?
Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my
companies.
I am reminded of an old story about army quartermasters. When you
walk into the quartermasters office with a request he opens a thick book of regulations. One sort of quartermaster is looking for the rule that says
you can't have it the other is looking for the way through the maze of
rules that lets you have it.
Guess which one has the easier job of searching. I've been watching this for a long time too - until fairly recently it was not looking good at all. Cheap reliable flow batteries really do change the picture of what is possible - you should research the technology, it's pretty cool stuff.
Phasing out oil etc. with what's available off the shelf today is certainly possible but feasibility is dubious the numbers are huge and the logistics daunting. A decade ago it was almost certainly not possible and certainly not even remotely feasible. This is the right direction.
Necessity is the mother of invention - and this is one mother of a necessity. When you were calculating the available space for everything did you consider off shore floating solar power stations covering large areas
of open ocean ?
It can only get easier, can it get easy enough soon enough ? Who
knows but I'm certain nuclear won't be given the chance until far too late and I really don't like the results of civil engineering being done far too quickly. A few bridges needing bracing and crumbling buildings getting condemned is one thing ...
No Empire Has Lasted Yet in history, US is way over the hill.Yes, these 19th century Empires are a bit passé..the end of Russian federation, the European Union, the United states - all are possible and
Likely Texas will soon leave that Union... the others will follow.
On 07/08/2023 11:49, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
What could possibly go wrong ?Almost nothing. Even the worst ever reactor built - the Chernobyl style, could if managed by competent staff produce safe electriity for years if
you didnt fuck with it, as the chernobyl staff did.
Guess which one has the easier job of searching. I've been watching
this for a long time too - until fairly recently it was not looking good at >> all. Cheap reliable flow batteries really do change the picture of what is >> possible - you should research the technology, it's pretty cool stuff.
No they dont. They have neither the capacity nor the discharge rate
We need nuclear weapon sized storage. No chemical battery has that. We
would be better of sythnesising coal diesel or gas and burnbing that.
But its too inefficient
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:
No Empire Has Lasted Yet in history, US is way over the hill.Yes, these 19th century Empires are a bit passé..the end of Russian federation, the European Union, the United states - all are possible and more, or less likely as time moves on.
Likely Texas will soon leave that Union... the others will follow.
In an unlikely turn of phrase, in rapidly changing world contexts, they
are simply too big to survive.
What suits downtown New York does not suit wilderness Utah. And vice versa.
federalisation at least and possible independence, whilst maintaining
overall ties under some NATO and Interpol style pan national
organisations would seem to be the way forward
t is better to peacefully live together with Russia (and China, US is pestering China too,
even does not allow Dutch ASML to sell high quality chip making equipment to China)
We need to get rid in the EU of the US Mafia, make peace with Russia.
No they dont. They have neither the capacity nor the discharge rate
We need nuclear weapon sized storage.
On 07 Aug 2023 at 14:33:26 BST, "The Natural Philosopher" <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 07/08/2023 11:49, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
What could possibly go wrong ?Almost nothing. Even the worst ever reactor built - the Chernobyl style,
could if managed by competent staff produce safe electriity for years if
you didnt fuck with it, as the chernobyl staff did.
And they had to work quite hard to make it go pop. They disconnected the computers and all the safety interlocks.
Guess which one has the easier job of searching. I've been watching >>> this for a long time too - until fairly recently it was not looking good at >>> all. Cheap reliable flow batteries really do change the picture of what is >>> possible - you should research the technology, it's pretty cool stuff.
No they dont. They have neither the capacity nor the discharge rate
We need nuclear weapon sized storage. No chemical battery has that. We
would be better of sythnesising coal diesel or gas and burnbing that.
But its too inefficient
If you take that battery that Musk (IIRC) installed in South Australia on their grid, and scale it up so it can power the grid for a week (for the periods in winter of 5 to 10 days when wind and solar produce nothing), it will set you back about £1,000,000,000,000 and no pence. And require a chunk of land. Also, I'd hate to be anywhere near it if it caught fire.
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uaqspr$2skqd$1@dont-email.me>:
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:\
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
ROFLMAO.
I do seem to remember that it was Russia that freed much of the European continent from the nazis in WW2
Its better to run the world on fairy farts and unicorn horns, but it
ain't happening any time soon.
It will always be one ant heap against the other, it would only change if we (humming beans)
faced for example a common enemy, say for example an invader from space.
And you don't think that gas came at a price, when the *whole* of theThe only way to live peacefully with Russia is to let Russia run your
country and rip off everything you own after they have destroyed your
cities raped the women and killed all the men.
Not so, using Russian gas was OK, benefitted both sides.
CIA has as mission to put petrol on any fire they can find to get the war machine going so their bosses
can sell more weapons.
We, in Europe, can make much better weapons than for example that F35 crap, UK had some nice VTOL fighters.
But Boris was an US clown who just separated UK from Europe hurting everybody in the UK.
They then move Russians in and claim 'it wants to be part of Russia'.
I am profoundly grateful that the USA is making some cash out of this,
as much as I am profoundly grateful that its not Britain this time
standing alone,
I worked for Tek when the Iraq war started, so elated they were with the extra orders killing Iraqis provided...
I quit. and told them why.
Before that CIA wanted me, I told them to stuff it.
Without Russia good chance you English would now be speaking German :-)
On 07/08/2023 16:43, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in
<uaqspr$2skqd$1@dont-email.me>:
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:\
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
ROFLMAO.
I do seem to remember that it was Russia that freed much of the
European continent from the nazis in WW2
Yes, but they did it with UK/US planes, tanks, ammunition
Much of it shipped via the northern route around Norway/Finland to the detriment of many "allied" merchant seamen.
Oh, and then they occupied what they could.
Was Stalin worse than Hitler?
He managed to kill a hell of a lot of people of "other" ethnicities.
On a sunny day (7 Aug 2023 15:02:21 GMT) it happened TimS <tim@streater.me.uk>
wrote in <kjcfbtF5edeU1@mid.individual.net>:
On 07 Aug 2023 at 12:55:12 BST, "Jan Panteltje" <alien@comet.invalid> wrote: >>
t is better to peacefully live together with Russia (and China, US is
pestering China too,
even does not allow Dutch ASML to sell high quality chip making equipment to
China)
We need to get rid in the EU of the US Mafia, make peace with Russia.
You appear to be unaware that although you are not interested in war, war is >> very interested in you.
It takes two sides to make peace, and only one side is needed to make war.
That is where ByeThen came in, provoking Putin.
US needed an other war theatre after Afghanistan.
As Europe saw in 1938-1939-1940.
Russia freed most of Europe from the nazis.
Read up on history.
On a sunny day (7 Aug 2023 15:02:21 GMT) it happened TimS <tim@streater.me.uk>
wrote in <kjcfbtF5edeU1@mid.individual.net>:
On 07 Aug 2023 at 12:55:12 BST, "Jan Panteltje" <alien@comet.invalid> wrote: >>
t is better to peacefully live together with Russia (and China, US is
pestering China too,
even does not allow Dutch ASML to sell high quality chip making equipment to
China)
We need to get rid in the EU of the US Mafia, make peace with Russia.
You appear to be unaware that although you are not interested in war, war is >> very interested in you.
It takes two sides to make peace, and only one side is needed to make war.
That is where ByeThen came in, provoking Putin.
US needed an other war theatre after Afghanistan.
As Europe saw in 1938-1939-1940.
Russia freed most of Europe from the nazis.
Read up on history.
On 8/7/23 08:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (7 Aug 2023 15:02:21 GMT) it happened TimS <tim@streater.me.uk>
wrote in <kjcfbtF5edeU1@mid.individual.net>:
On 07 Aug 2023 at 12:55:12 BST, "Jan Panteltje" <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:That is where ByeThen came in, provoking Putin.
t is better to peacefully live together with Russia (and China, US is
pestering China too,
even does not allow Dutch ASML to sell high quality chip making equipment to
China)
We need to get rid in the EU of the US Mafia, make peace with Russia.
You appear to be unaware that although you are not interested in war, war is
very interested in you.
It takes two sides to make peace, and only one side is needed to make war. >>
US needed an other war theatre after Afghanistan.
As Europe saw in 1938-1939-1940.
Russia freed most of Europe from the nazis.
Read up on history.
Read up on real history, you stupid Russian propagandist.
The Russian effort was fueled by American Lend Lease.
The Russian troops and the Americans got along very well when they met
in Germany at the End of WW II
Most of Europe means that they established Communist Government in
every nation that they "freed" from the NAZIs.
And Putin would put his Fascist dictatorship in place of the
Governments of Free Europe.
bliss - an American who thinks Biden is not perfect but infinitely
better than Trump or his American Fascist imitators.
On 07 Aug 2023 at 21:03:37 BST, "Bobbie Sellers" <bliss@mouse-potato.com> wrote:
On 8/7/23 08:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (7 Aug 2023 15:02:21 GMT) it happened TimS <tim@streater.me.uk>
wrote in <kjcfbtF5edeU1@mid.individual.net>:
On 07 Aug 2023 at 12:55:12 BST, "Jan Panteltje" <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:That is where ByeThen came in, provoking Putin.
t is better to peacefully live together with Russia (and China, US is >>>>> pestering China too,You appear to be unaware that although you are not interested in war, war is
even does not allow Dutch ASML to sell high quality chip making equipment to
China)
We need to get rid in the EU of the US Mafia, make peace with Russia. >>>>
very interested in you.
It takes two sides to make peace, and only one side is needed to make war. >>>
US needed an other war theatre after Afghanistan.
As Europe saw in 1938-1939-1940.
Russia freed most of Europe from the nazis.
Read up on history.
Read up on real history, you stupid Russian propagandist.
The Russian effort was fueled by American Lend Lease.
The Russian troops and the Americans got along very well when they met >> in Germany at the End of WW II
Most of Europe means that they established Communist Government in
every nation that they "freed" from the NAZIs.
And Putin would put his Fascist dictatorship in place of the
Governments of Free Europe.
bliss - an American who thinks Biden is not perfect but infinitely
better than Trump or his American Fascist imitators.
Trump is the Idi Amin of our times.
On 07/08/2023 16:43, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uaqspr$2skqd$1@dont-email.me>: >>
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:\
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
ROFLMAO.
I do seem to remember that it was Russia that freed much of the European continent from the nazis in WW2
No, its was the Russians who occupied the countries that Germany had
overrun, and committed almost identical atrocities to them.
They weren't freed, they just had a different slavemaster.
Its better to run the world on fairy farts and unicorn horns, but it
ain't happening any time soon.
It will always be one ant heap against the other, it would only change if we (humming beans)
faced for example a common enemy, say for example an invader from space.
Correct. Wars started when we stopped wandering around an hunting and >gathering, and started collecting food animals into enclosures.
It was always going to be a tough choice between collecting your own
animals and fencing them in, which is hard work, or simply taking over >someone's place where the hard work was already done, killing the owner
and his sons and having fun with the daughters.
Its all perfectly rational cost benefit analysis. And the above is a
pretty accurate desrciption of Russian behaviour in Ukraine, by all >accounts.
And you don't think that gas came at a price, when the *whole* of the
The only way to live peacefully with Russia is to let Russia run your
country and rip off everything you own after they have destroyed your
cities raped the women and killed all the men.
Not so, using Russian gas was OK, benefitted both sides.
ruling party in Germany had *all* been to Moscow at the Kremlins
expense, with all 'entertainments' laid on and a hidden camera in every
room?
And its a toss up as to whether more Republicans or more democrats are
in the pay of, or being blackmailed by the FSB., Or how many
organisations like Greenpeace, FOE, Black Lives Matter or any of the
rest of them are not indirectly funded and controlled by Russia? The
Kremlin has global aspirations and it was doing famously until it
started an actual hot war. Huge mistake. It had already destroyed most
of the West through culturual Marxism, as some people call it.
CIA has as mission to put petrol on any fire they can find to get the war machine going so their bosses
can sell more weapons.
We, in Europe, can make much better weapons than for example that F35 crap, UK had some nice VTOL fighters.
But Boris was an US clown who just separated UK from Europe hurting everybody in the UK.
You have no clue about what you are talking.
Boris didnt do anything except ride a political movemenjt for his own
career. And you cant separate the UK from Europe, we are patrt of Euripe
and we are Europeans.
What happened is that after repeatedly asking the European Union to be >sensible and stop taking bribes, publish their accounts and gernerallly
start behaving like a adult and responsible government and not a Mafia,
the people of the UK finally got so pissed off with them they they gave
them the finger and left.
It was never about leaving Europe - that is the canard the EU made up,
It was always about leaving the oppressive, utterly corrupt
antidemocratic and incompetent European Union.
And the Union has been trying to destroy Britain just like Russia is
trying to destroy Ukraine, for having the audacity to tell them,
politely to fuck off...
They then move Russians in and claim 'it wants to be part of Russia'.
I am profoundly grateful that the USA is making some cash out of this,
as much as I am profoundly grateful that its not Britain this time
standing alone,
I worked for Tek when the Iraq war started, so elated they were with the extra orders killing Iraqis provided...
I quit. and told them why.
Before that CIA wanted me, I told them to stuff it.
Sure, I worked for weapons companies for a while. I felt uneasy, and
left. They weren't saints for sure. loads of taxpayer money being
wasted, but we did put together some pretty good tech as well, and when
it comes to corruptions in the 'military industrial complex', there is
only one winner, an it ain't the USA, its jolly old Putinosvky and his >oligarchic Ripoffsky, Defraudski, and Gimmeayachtsky.
Without Russia good chance you English would now be speaking German :-)Not at all, without UK and US help, Russia would all be speaking
German, and would be slightly more civilised.
Frankly the US was incredibly stupid, Churchill tried to tell them what
was going on. But Roosevelt ignored him and cosied up instead to the
mass murderer who had killed millions of his own people, and went on to
kill millions more. I guess given the experience of the Native Americans
and black slaves, the USA felt Russia was a kindred spirit in genocide.
As it was it wasn't until what Churchill called the 'iron curtain' came
down that the USA actually woke up to the fact that they looked set to
lose an entire market nearly as big as the USA to Russia that they
decided to create NATO...if Russia had trolled all the way to France -
and the UK didnt have the power to stop them - then there would have
been a perfect third Reich, just speaking Russian, that;'s all.
And big enough to take on the USA, and win.
"Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more
than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim
to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention
and interrogation by Stalin’s henchmen. Stalin’s Genocides is the >chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important
argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed
acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.
Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, >challenges the widely held notion that Stalin’s crimes do not constitute >genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing
of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent
national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin
became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and >harrowing episodes of Stalin’s systematic destruction of his own >populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the >Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and >examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition,
Naimark compares Stalin’s crimes with those of the most notorious
genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler."
Where are the real inhabitants of Crimea? They are neither Ukrainians
nor Russians, they were Tatars. They were all deported or killed.
"Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimea's population from the
time of ethnogenesis until the mid-19th century, and the largest ethnic >population until the end of the 19th century. Russia attempted to purge >Crimean Tatars through a combination of physical violence, intimidation, >forced resettlement, and legalized forms of discrimination between 1783
and 1900. Between Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 1783 and 1800,
somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Crimean Tatars emigrated. However,
this did not result in the complete eradication of Crimean Tatar
cultural elements (at least not under the Romanov dynasty; however,
under the Soviets, the Crimean Tatars were almost completely driven from
the Crimean peninsula). Almost immediately after retaking of Crimea from
Axis forces, in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the >deportation of all of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea, including the
families of Crimean Tatars who had served in the Soviet Army. The
deportees were transported in trains and boxcars to Central Asia,
primarily to Uzbekistan. The Crimean Tatars lost 18 to 46 percent of
their population as a result of the deportations. Starting in 1967, a
few were allowed to return and in 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet
Union condemned the removal of Crimean Tatars from their motherland as >inhumane and lawless, but only a tiny percent were able to return before
the full right of return became policy in 1989. "
Russia has form Jan. THAT is why we are funding Ukraine. Russia is not a
nice civilised country even though it had Starbucks and McDonalds in
Moscow, st Petersburg and Novosibirsk. It is, behind the civilised
veneer of its urban population, desperately backward, rural, brutal and >lawless, and guess who gets sent to Ukraine, Not the urban westernised >hipsters. The peasants and dregs from the houses with no running water
no electricity and no flush toilets. From Siberia. Or the Chechens.
Chechen Lives Don't Matter. There are as many fighting FOR Ukraine as
against them. Same with the Georgians. Everybody hates Russians. And for >really good reasons. They are ruthless selfish brutal racists, genocidal >psychopaths, supreme liars, corrupt from top to bottom, and have
absolutely no honour whatsoever. An agreement is there to be broken when
it suits them.
Any decent Russian has already left.
Do the research. Don't listen to the paid Russian trolls on the mass
media saying how 'Russia has a point' They don't. Russian methodology is
100% incompatible with Western civilisation and values , they know it,
and are fighting to destroy it but we don't. We - well you - still
think they are decent reasonable people and can be negotiated with.
They cannot. Putin is a pure bred pyschopath and he is president because
that is what it takes to become a president in Russia. Instead of
merely very rich and 100% corrupt, like America. Or 100% corrupt and
only modestly rich, like the EU.
We cannot negotiate with him, He will break any treaty. WE cannot regime >change him, because someone exactly the same would take his place. All
we can do is degrade his military potential and let his federation
collapse from within, and deal with whoever has an ounce of integrity
that emerges out of the chaos, and if te price of that is we have to pay
more for oil, well let them eat uranium instead, as some french tart
once said.
...
"Super-Fault-Tolerant" has always interested and
impressed me. It's an art unto itself. There are
only a few NEEDS - nuclear-weapons systems, nuke
reactors and, coolest, space probes. The way NASA
can essentially re-wire probes, work around even
primary memory and maybe sub-processor failure and
such, over a billion-mile remote connection is
just spectacular.
On 07/08/2023 17:01, Chris Elvidge wrote:
On 07/08/2023 16:43, Jan Panteltje wrote:I wouldn't want to pick one out of Putin, Stalin or Hitler, or indeed
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in
<uaqspr$2skqd$1@dont-email.me>:
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:\
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
ROFLMAO.
I do seem to remember that it was Russia that freed much of the
European continent from the nazis in WW2
Yes, but they did it with UK/US planes, tanks, ammunition
Much of it shipped via the northern route around Norway/Finland to the
detriment of many "allied" merchant seamen.
Oh, and then they occupied what they could.
Was Stalin worse than Hitler?
He managed to kill a hell of a lot of people of "other" ethnicities.
Robert Mugabe, or Pol Pot, or Chairman Mao. Or indeed Kim Yong Um and
his utterly murderous sister.
It seems that the transition from barbarism towards westernised
technology is marked by the rise of psychopathic despots who have no
regard for their people whatsoever. And whose sole reason for being in
power is that they somehow acquired industrialised weapons first.
On 07/08/2023 06:31, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/4/23 4:51 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2023 06:08, 23k.304 wrote:
On 8/3/23 2:44 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:I am not sure it actually does. If you turn off 'last read' with
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Aug 2023 17:47:56 +0100) it happened The
Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in
<uae1bt$5slp$1@dont-email.me>:
ANYway, /var/log CAN be moved to a RAMdisk if you want.
Not 100% sure WHY you'd want to, but it CAN. If a few
very early logs get 'lost' as you re-direct /var/log
then that MIGHT not be all so important. If you want
it all on RAMdisk then you don't CARE if it all
vanishes on reboot. I very rarely look in /var/log
anyhow so ....
As I said, whoever you are, the less writing to an SD drive there is, >>>>>> the less chance there is of file system corruption when the power
goes out.
To avoid restarts on power failure use a UPS (I do) or just a
simple battery circuit
was it not called 'battery hat' or something? with the Pi.
I remember the "battery hat" - still sold :
https://www.waveshare.com/li-ion-battery-hat.htm
But MOST Pi's, because of the high power consumption,
still run off the mains - so a UPS is probably the
simplest option. The "battery hat" however might
serve to deal with very short interruptions.
However I don't think the most stress to SD cards
is on boot - but during regular USE ... the usual
data churning and loading system apps from the
card. If "ping" is used, well, where does it COME
from on a PI ? The SD card. Each application has
to be examined to see what routines are used and
put them into a RAMdisk or whatever. Remember,
even reading an SD card involves re-writing the
thing, that's how the tech works.
'noatime'
Which you surely would if you cared enough
A right move ... but doesn't entirely solve the
SD-wear problem. System apps you're using a lot
really MUST be moved to RAMdisk. A certain amount
of the OS does wind up on its own RAMdisk, but
it might not be what YOU are using a lot.
No system apps are in use in the sense that they are being loaded from
disk.
The are all memory resident and thats that.
Three daemons, maybe four
Apache web server plus sensor watchdog that wakes up every second, looks
at the state of various RAMDISK based files and reads the SD based
config files, probably from disk cache 99.99% of the time, and turns
stuff on and off, plus an xinetd daemon that accepts input from remote thermometers and writes to ram disk and possibly a similar one for the
oil sensor.
And that's it.
I guess the usual cron jobs will run, vut thst so on any Pi running
Raspios.
Hey, Raspbian might be 2gb image on the SD card
but yer Pi, depending on model, might not have
much more RAM (or even LESS if it's a Pi-1/2).
As such the WHOLE OS cannot be put into RAM.
All the parts that can't, well, they get read
over and over from the SD.
No, they don't. Because huge swathes of the disk image contain programs
that are *never run at all*. My pi came with for example, gcc and
friends. Thousands of
development header files and libraries that will never be invoked once
the code is stable. Once running my server is currently only using 60MB
of RAM, with 200+MB in use as disk cache. and over 100MB that isn't used
at all!
I am running apparently 110 separate processes. But these are all kernel processes for the most part, and use very little RAM or CPU. The load
average is simply 'nothing' . In short this little Zero is completely overspecified for the job it does. It wont wear the card out.
Nothing that is in the disk cache need ever be read from the disk. And
indeed if it is written to, the OS will only periodically flush its
buffers. Those disk caches ARE an effective ram disk protecting the SD
card from many reads and writes.
And doesn't mind being read, it's writes that screw it, anyway.
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 01:31:26 -0400) it happened "23k.304" <23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <EuCdnXh3WrgjHE35nZ2dnZfqnPidnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
The compiler-writers have become VERY VERY good.
Stuff I commonly wrote in ASM on u-controllers
is actually smaller/faster now using 'C'. That's
just IMPRESSIVE.
It may be true for ARM, at least for me, on Raspberry as I have no real experience writing ARM ASM.
But a simple example for data storage on SDcard (2 GB SDcard in this case) is for example here:
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/quadcopter/index.html
scroll down to flywayspoints.tgz
If you have only one set of data, you do not need a filesystem on the SDcard.
I use a Microchip PIC 18F14K22 with code in its FLASH memory
that reads the SDcard one sector at the time.
Example:
You have blocks of data, one per second (for example) with GPS position, altitude, heading, etc, that easily fits in 512 bytes.
So one sector per data record,
Cards come new with some Microsoft filesystem, no need for it.
PIC is programmed in asm, I used Philips C routines to write to a SDcard sector that I translated into PIC asm.
So that beats any 'operating system' in code size and any hardware it runs on in power consumption
and actually if you have some experience with PIC asm in programming time.
An no more silly libraries that change every new release causing things to no longer work.
I occasionally looked at .a files on *86, and they wrote better
assembler than I could.
The old 'Dilbert' narrow-tie people WERE damned good.
Modern hardware with a lot more resources kind of
made them obsolete - any 10-year-old could write
adequate code then.
So much so that I gave up looking.
I went to 'C' and PASCAL early on. ASM became only
for a handful of very weird things neither did well
at the time.
Yes Pascal, I did some uni stuff in that, anybody still using it?
Maybe python will go the same way.
This thing uses the same way to write to SDcard one record to one sector per time interval:
https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/pic/gm_pic2/
both the C code to read such card and the PIC asm can be downloaded from that site.
On 09/08/2023 06:28, 23k.304 wrote:
Umm ... Apache is NOT a trival app. Does all KINDSEffectvely yes, Ir they are read only
of things. Are those "things" also on the RAMdisk ???
Sure, it loads a PHP file or ten, but they are read only and they will
be cached, so they will have no impact on 'wearing' the SD card
The only thing apache *writes* is log files, and they are on ram disc
and the only thing that my code *writes* beyond configuration files
that are then only ever read, is also on ram disk
You seem to be under a misapprehension that reads wear out SD cards.
They dont. Only writes do. Hence the -naoatime directive,
A Pi running strictly in terminal mode, no GUIs/Xorg,
running just a few 'system' thingies is (relatively)
easy to deal with.
That's how I use em. They are not powerful enough for a desktop, for me,
yet.
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 18:01:48 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uar81s$2ui9t$1@dont-email.me>:
On 07/08/2023 16:43, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Aug 2023 14:49:46 +0100) it happened The Natural
Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote in <uaqspr$2skqd$1@dont-email.me>: >>>
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:\
It is better to peacefully live together with Russia
ROFLMAO.
I do seem to remember that it was Russia that freed much of the European continent from the nazis in WW2
No, its was the Russians who occupied the countries that Germany had
overrun, and committed almost identical atrocities to them.
They weren't freed, they just had a different slavemaster.
My father was in the resistance in the Netherlands in WW2.
He also was a journalist that wrote anti-nazi stuff.
The Germans put him in a concentration camp.
He was freed by the brave Russians.
Occupation clear to me these days here is more by US
The international court of justice in the Hague must now judge on some things says US
but was not allowed to judge on US war crimes / criminals in Iraq else 'Bush would invade ' (The Netherlands).
Talk about Mafia, the US is one.
Just big weapons manufacturers that even supply their own people no end and kill thousand of their
own people just for sales.
It designed covid but as always used the far from their bed method and did the experiments in a Chinese lab,
the same experiments that were considered too dangerous by US DOD itself. Faulty a mass murderer as government adviser now still not sentenced to how many lifetimes or the chair.
So damage China, the competition. backfired now did it not!
but then they made millions on the vaccines, those kill many too.
Criminals they, US, are.
Its better to run the world on fairy farts and unicorn horns, but it
ain't happening any time soon.
It will always be one ant heap against the other, it would only change if we (humming beans)
faced for example a common enemy, say for example an invader from space.
Correct. Wars started when we stopped wandering around an hunting and
gathering, and started collecting food animals into enclosures.
It was always going to be a tough choice between collecting your own
animals and fencing them in, which is hard work, or simply taking over
someone's place where the hard work was already done, killing the owner
and his sons and having fun with the daughters.
Its all perfectly rational cost benefit analysis. And the above is a
pretty accurate desrciption of Russian behaviour in Ukraine, by all
accounts.
And you don't think that gas came at a price, when the *whole* of the
The only way to live peacefully with Russia is to let Russia run your
country and rip off everything you own after they have destroyed your
cities raped the women and killed all the men.
Not so, using Russian gas was OK, benefitted both sides.
ruling party in Germany had *all* been to Moscow at the Kremlins
expense, with all 'entertainments' laid on and a hidden camera in every
room?
And its a toss up as to whether more Republicans or more democrats are
in the pay of, or being blackmailed by the FSB., Or how many
organisations like Greenpeace, FOE, Black Lives Matter or any of the
rest of them are not indirectly funded and controlled by Russia? The
Kremlin has global aspirations and it was doing famously until it
started an actual hot war. Huge mistake. It had already destroyed most
of the West through culturual Marxism, as some people call it.
CIA has as mission to put petrol on any fire they can find to get the war machine going so their bosses
can sell more weapons.
We, in Europe, can make much better weapons than for example that F35 crap, UK had some nice VTOL fighters.
But Boris was an US clown who just separated UK from Europe hurting everybody in the UK.
You have no clue about what you are talking.
Boris didnt do anything except ride a political movemenjt for his own
career. And you cant separate the UK from Europe, we are patrt of Euripe
and we are Europeans.
What happened is that after repeatedly asking the European Union to be
sensible and stop taking bribes, publish their accounts and gernerallly
start behaving like a adult and responsible government and not a Mafia,
the people of the UK finally got so pissed off with them they they gave
them the finger and left.
It was never about leaving Europe - that is the canard the EU made up,
It was always about leaving the oppressive, utterly corrupt
antidemocratic and incompetent European Union.
And the Union has been trying to destroy Britain just like Russia is
trying to destroy Ukraine, for having the audacity to tell them,
politely to fuck off...
They then move Russians in and claim 'it wants to be part of Russia'.
I am profoundly grateful that the USA is making some cash out of this, >>>> as much as I am profoundly grateful that its not Britain this time
standing alone,
I worked for Tek when the Iraq war started, so elated they were with the extra orders killing Iraqis provided...
I quit. and told them why.
Before that CIA wanted me, I told them to stuff it.
Sure, I worked for weapons companies for a while. I felt uneasy, and
left. They weren't saints for sure. loads of taxpayer money being
wasted, but we did put together some pretty good tech as well, and when
it comes to corruptions in the 'military industrial complex', there is
only one winner, an it ain't the USA, its jolly old Putinosvky and his
oligarchic Ripoffsky, Defraudski, and Gimmeayachtsky.
Without Russia good chance you English would now be speaking German :-)Not at all, without UK and US help, Russia would all be speaking
German, and would be slightly more civilised.
Frankly the US was incredibly stupid, Churchill tried to tell them what
was going on. But Roosevelt ignored him and cosied up instead to the
mass murderer who had killed millions of his own people, and went on to
kill millions more. I guess given the experience of the Native Americans
and black slaves, the USA felt Russia was a kindred spirit in genocide.
As it was it wasn't until what Churchill called the 'iron curtain' came
down that the USA actually woke up to the fact that they looked set to
lose an entire market nearly as big as the USA to Russia that they
decided to create NATO...if Russia had trolled all the way to France -
and the UK didnt have the power to stop them - then there would have
been a perfect third Reich, just speaking Russian, that;'s all.
And big enough to take on the USA, and win.
"Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more
than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim
to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention
and interrogation by Stalin’s henchmen. Stalin’s Genocides is the
chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important
argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed
acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.
Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era,
challenges the widely held notion that Stalin’s crimes do not constitute >> genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing
of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent
national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin
became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and
harrowing episodes of Stalin’s systematic destruction of his own
populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the
Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and
examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition,
Naimark compares Stalin’s crimes with those of the most notorious
genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler."
Where are the real inhabitants of Crimea? They are neither Ukrainians
nor Russians, they were Tatars. They were all deported or killed.
"Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimea's population from the
time of ethnogenesis until the mid-19th century, and the largest ethnic
population until the end of the 19th century. Russia attempted to purge
Crimean Tatars through a combination of physical violence, intimidation,
forced resettlement, and legalized forms of discrimination between 1783
and 1900. Between Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 1783 and 1800,
somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Crimean Tatars emigrated. However,
this did not result in the complete eradication of Crimean Tatar
cultural elements (at least not under the Romanov dynasty; however,
under the Soviets, the Crimean Tatars were almost completely driven from
the Crimean peninsula). Almost immediately after retaking of Crimea from
Axis forces, in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the
deportation of all of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea, including the
families of Crimean Tatars who had served in the Soviet Army. The
deportees were transported in trains and boxcars to Central Asia,
primarily to Uzbekistan. The Crimean Tatars lost 18 to 46 percent of
their population as a result of the deportations. Starting in 1967, a
few were allowed to return and in 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet
Union condemned the removal of Crimean Tatars from their motherland as
inhumane and lawless, but only a tiny percent were able to return before
the full right of return became policy in 1989. "
Russia has form Jan. THAT is why we are funding Ukraine. Russia is not a
nice civilised country even though it had Starbucks and McDonalds in
Moscow, st Petersburg and Novosibirsk. It is, behind the civilised
veneer of its urban population, desperately backward, rural, brutal and
lawless, and guess who gets sent to Ukraine, Not the urban westernised
hipsters. The peasants and dregs from the houses with no running water
no electricity and no flush toilets. From Siberia. Or the Chechens.
Chechen Lives Don't Matter. There are as many fighting FOR Ukraine as
against them. Same with the Georgians. Everybody hates Russians. And for
really good reasons. They are ruthless selfish brutal racists, genocidal
psychopaths, supreme liars, corrupt from top to bottom, and have
absolutely no honour whatsoever. An agreement is there to be broken when
it suits them.
Any decent Russian has already left.
Do the research. Don't listen to the paid Russian trolls on the mass
media saying how 'Russia has a point' They don't. Russian methodology is
100% incompatible with Western civilisation and values , they know it,
and are fighting to destroy it but we don't. We - well you - still
think they are decent reasonable people and can be negotiated with.
They cannot. Putin is a pure bred pyschopath and he is president because
that is what it takes to become a president in Russia. Instead of
merely very rich and 100% corrupt, like America. Or 100% corrupt and
only modestly rich, like the EU.
We cannot negotiate with him, He will break any treaty. WE cannot regime
change him, because someone exactly the same would take his place. All
we can do is degrade his military potential and let his federation
collapse from within, and deal with whoever has an ounce of integrity
that emerges out of the chaos, and if te price of that is we have to pay
more for oil, well let them eat uranium instead, as some french tart
once said.
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
On 8/8/23 12:18 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
How big of a vodka ration does Putin provide ?
Clue - BIG clue - people don't flee to Russia,
they flee to 'western' countries/USA instead.
On 07/08/2023 05:21, 23k.304 wrote:
Getting an EXACT voltage output from a little "hummer" supply
like that might be tricky. As said, it depends on what you're doing.
Oh, if you're powering direct from the mains, why CARE what
the quiescent current is ? That's more for battery/solar apps.
You could use a vacuum-tube based power supply 😄
There are two halves to what I am building. A mains powered server in a
box controlling stuff and accepting inputs from remote sensors and
running a web server as a user interface for user level information and control, and the sensors themselves which may, and in one case must be, battery powered. Namely thermometers, whose response time will be in
tens of minutes at best, and a (battery powered) oil level sensor whose response can be in an hour or two.
So the mains powered server, already has relays switching mains in it,
and I have bought a custom 'block' switched mode PSU that should run it
ok. The Pi Zero W has its own SMPS internally to generate the 3V3 and
1V8 rails it needs, and will allegedly run from 1.8V to 5.5V input wise,
and the PICO has similar, although it seems to only need 3V3.
So its (the PICO) fairly ideal for battery power, as long as it spends
plenty of time *off*...
The idea is the thermometers won't *need* batteries if there is a handy
USB power source available, but the oil sensor is not so lucky. It must
be battery powered.
On 09/08/2023 06:28, 23k.304 wrote:
Umm ... Apache is NOT a trival app. Does all KINDSEffectvely yes, Ir they are read only
of things. Are those "things" also on the RAMdisk ???
Sure, it loads a PHP file or ten, but they are read only and they will
be cached, so they will have no impact on 'wearing' the SD card
The only thing apache *writes* is log files, and they are on ram disc
and the only thing that my code *writes* beyond configuration files
that are then only ever read, is also on ram disk
You seem to be under a misapprehension that reads wear out SD cards.
They dont. Only writes do. Hence the -naoatime directive,
A Pi running strictly in terminal mode, no GUIs/Xorg,
running just a few 'system' thingies is (relatively)
easy to deal with.
That's how I use em. They are not powerful enough for a desktop, for me,
yet.
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:43:20 -0400) it happened "23k.304" <23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <Oe-cnQaXFuF190n5nZ2dnZfqnPSdnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/8/23 12:18 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
How big of a vodka ration does Putin provide ?
Clue - BIG clue - people don't flee to Russia,
Edward Snowden
they flee to 'western' countries/USA instead.
Western countries want cheap worker slaves.
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 08:21:04 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 06/08/2023 02:45, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>When you are looking at second hand SD cards plus postage, the cost
wrote:
benefit analyis told me I should pay the money for whatever was the
current best price on new stuff , with plenty of life left, from the
same shop that was shipping me the Pi. To leverage the postage. and that
turns out to be 16GB. Why, I don't have a clue. I could ask an old
college friend who used to work designing NAND flash in California, but
I am not sure I give a rat's arse why.
Again, you asses a situation and what you want, and work out the least
cost and effort to arrive at that target. If I could get 2GB cards at 5
for £10 I'd use those, But I cant.
I was interested because I don't remember ever having an SD card for my
ancient camera that was that small (256MB).
I use 8GB Samsung in my cameras and flight recorders. If you buy branded cards from brands that are known the own their own chip fab, then you're
less likely to end up with some chunk of junk with memory to hold just a fraction of its advertised capacity.
On 8/10/23 1:33 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:43:20 -0400) it happened "23k.304"
<23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <Oe-cnQaXFuF190n5nZ2dnZfqnPSdnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/8/23 12:18 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
How big of a vodka ration does Putin provide ?
Clue - BIG clue - people don't flee to Russia,
Edward Snowden
No choice. Somehow I really doubt he's happy.
they flee to 'western' countries/USA instead.
Western countries want cheap worker slaves.
Eastern countries try to convince them that
de-facto slavery is a Great Thing ....
On 8/6/23 10:22 AM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2023 08:21:04 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 06/08/2023 02:45, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>When you are looking at second hand SD cards plus postage, the cost
wrote:
benefit analyis told me I should pay the money for whatever was the
current best price on new stuff , with plenty of life left, from the
same shop that was shipping me the Pi. To leverage the postage. and that >>> turns out to be 16GB. Why, I don't have a clue. I could ask an old
college friend who used to work designing NAND flash in California, but
I am not sure I give a rat's arse why.
Again, you asses a situation and what you want, and work out the least
cost and effort to arrive at that target. If I could get 2GB cards at 5 >>> for £10 I'd use those, But I cant.
I was interested because I don't remember ever having an SD card for my
ancient camera that was that small (256MB).
I use 8GB Samsung in my cameras and flight recorders. If you buy branded
cards from brands that are known the own their own chip fab, then you're
less likely to end up with some chunk of junk with memory to hold just a
fraction of its advertised capacity.
At present, Samsung is The Best.
Somewhere, maybe deep, there'll be code to get
the most out of their devices.
Shit, I bought a Epson scanner - one of those
ones that just looks like a bar - took me like
six hours of digging to find a minimal app
for Linux. 99.99% of the site said no such thing
existed, but we have Fellow Travelers embedded
everywhere .....
As for cheapo cameras ... I once found a $7.95 cam
on a drugstore shelf. Absolutely HORRIBLE - could
barely manage 200-by. However, "artistically", the
sheer crappiness DID produce some interesting
results :-)
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
ARM is really a CPU, not u-Controller. Different rules.
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
On 8/9/23 5:53 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Effectvely yes, Ir they are read only
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
On 06/08/2023 15:45, Pancho wrote:
On 05/08/2023 22:14, Martin Gregorie wrote:Its been a few years now, since I felt my machines were too slow for the
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:23:21 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 14:36:08 +0100 Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
wrote:
I was actually surprised at how fast the new Ryzen was. Maybe it is
time to buy a new PC.
I haven't done that in a long time. I used to buy parts and make >>>> them but these days I buy "refurbished"* ex-corporate machines which
are
cheap and far better made than the typical consumer PC.
* Read cleaned, OS reinstalled and stripped of asset tags.
It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.
Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case
and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks
(bog
standard WD 500MB blue) since then.
I think it all depends, what you want. If you don't already have a PC
less than 10 years old, then second-hand deals are good.
In most respects I found a 10-year-old 2500K, OK to use. Up until a
couple of years ago it was my desktop, then its graphics card broke,
and it got relegated to HTPC, it wasn't so good at that. I've just
replaced it with an Orange Pi 5, with caveats, the Orange Pi 5 is
better as a TV computer. The Orange Pi 5 was cheap. I've also bought a
couple of low power new NUC types for about £200, for relatives, e.g.
Intel N5150, they are generally happy with them.
Mainly I've been interested in small low wattage PCs, it is only
recently that they have been quicker than my old 2500K. The new big
desktops were quick, but not that much quicker, maybe twice as fast,
for a reasonable price. Now, the Ryzen 5 7600 is looking to be 3-4
times as fast, single thread, more than 3-4 multi thread. Which might
be noticeable, for me, I don't know. Without having one, it is hard to
know.
job they were doing.
I accept that people doing video editing or shooting up 3D aliens in
unlikely scenarios may need more, but I don't.
I am more replacing now to lower power consumption, although even that
is not 100% wasted as the computers heat this room in winter.
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 02:01:16 -0400) it happened "23k.304" <23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <kf-dnWvP1JCx4En5nZ2dnZfqnPidnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/10/23 1:33 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:43:20 -0400) it happened "23k.304"
<23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <Oe-cnQaXFuF190n5nZ2dnZfqnPSdnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/8/23 12:18 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
How big of a vodka ration does Putin provide ?
Clue - BIG clue - people don't flee to Russia,
Edward Snowden
No choice. Somehow I really doubt he's happy.
they flee to 'western' countries/USA instead.
Western countries want cheap worker slaves.
Eastern countries try to convince them that
de-facto slavery is a Great Thing ....
In fact 'slavery' is a relative thing
Are our gut bacteria / microbes our slaves?
We feed them they provide us with energy
Its nature.
Same everywhere in nature.
People will migrate to where they think it will help them.
Maybe Russia is a bit too cold for the black Africans
or too many other countries in between when they can get what they want in Europe just a small boat trip away,
used to get you a room in a nice hotel in the UK...
Language is an other factor that counts.
I have never been to Russia myself, been to East Germany before and after the wall fell though.
Life was not bad or people unhappy there as far as I remember.
Did read these days people in East Germany are payed less .. housing, did things REALLY improve after the wall fell?
Products? I had a nice Werra 35 mm photo camera made in East Germany, color TV set too, transistor portable TVs.
Many things from the US are crap these days, not even counting that F35 disaster.
I have a Whirlpool washing machine (US), and laundry drier, good thing I am experienced in electronics
the washing machine broke down in the guarantee, power switcher design error, was fixed (new board),
then it broke down again a bit later, as did the laundry drier...
Got some spare parts from ebay, think I now used the last ones... Put some protection circuit against mains spikes in the thing.
so far still working... water was leaking into the electronics too.
not to mention all the other US crap like Teslas catching fire...
China is cheaper and most stuff from ebay from China just works, not perfect but good enough
like my sat receivers, short wave radio, mutimeters, keyboard and mouse, lights, wallwarts, battery chargers, solar panels,
(just looking around), drones, cameras, OLED and LCD displays,..
No wonder US is afraid of China, no way can they compete.
But their Microchip PICs are OK :-)
On 8/10/23 3:10 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 02:01:16 -0400) it happened "23k.304"
<23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <kf-dnWvP1JCx4En5nZ2dnZfqnPidnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/10/23 1:33 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:43:20 -0400) it happened "23k.304" >>>> <23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote in <Oe-cnQaXFuF190n5nZ2dnZfqnPSdnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
On 8/8/23 12:18 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Well that is a lot of Russofobia I'd say.
Much of that goes for 'merrica too.
Do you hide under the bed?
It is true the EU government is over-reaching in some things.
And not always doing the things that are best.
But that goes for politicians in general.
Is UK doing much better now? I think not if I read about food prices and housing there..
All seems to be heading to a WW3, I expect in 2024.
World population will then decrease ...
How big of a vodka ration does Putin provide ?
Clue - BIG clue - people don't flee to Russia,
Edward Snowden
No choice. Somehow I really doubt he's happy.
they flee to 'western' countries/USA instead.
Western countries want cheap worker slaves.
Eastern countries try to convince them that
de-facto slavery is a Great Thing ....
In fact 'slavery' is a relative thing
Are our gut bacteria / microbes our slaves?
We feed them they provide us with energy
Its nature.
Same everywhere in nature.
People will migrate to where they think it will help them.
Maybe Russia is a bit too cold for the black Africans
or too many other countries in between when they can get what they want in Europe just a small boat trip away,
used to get you a room in a nice hotel in the UK...
Language is an other factor that counts.
I have never been to Russia myself, been to East Germany before and after the wall fell though.
Life was not bad or people unhappy there as far as I remember.
Did read these days people in East Germany are payed less .. housing, did things REALLY improve after the wall fell?
Products? I had a nice Werra 35 mm photo camera made in East Germany, color TV set too, transistor portable TVs.
Many things from the US are crap these days, not even counting that F35 disaster.
I have a Whirlpool washing machine (US), and laundry drier, good thing I am experienced in electronics
the washing machine broke down in the guarantee, power switcher design error, was fixed (new board),
then it broke down again a bit later, as did the laundry drier...
Got some spare parts from ebay, think I now used the last ones... Put some protection circuit against mains spikes in the
thing.
so far still working... water was leaking into the electronics too.
not to mention all the other US crap like Teslas catching fire...
China is cheaper and most stuff from ebay from China just works, not perfect but good enough
like my sat receivers, short wave radio, mutimeters, keyboard and mouse, lights, wallwarts, battery chargers, solar panels,
(just looking around), drones, cameras, OLED and LCD displays,..
No wonder US is afraid of China, no way can they compete.
But their Microchip PICs are OK :-)
Ah, obfuscation ....
Is that in the FSB handbook ? Surely !
Piss off.
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
It is, at least as a general statement in regards to flash memory.
There may be /some/ flash "drives" (used generically to refer to SD and
SATA disks) where if the controller detects an issue with the read, it
may decide to reallocate the data to another set of flash cells.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
Consider the source....
I suspect he has mixed up flash technology with DRAM technology, where reading a row from DRAM
On Wed, 9 Aug 2023 02:44:46 -0400, "23k.304" <23k304@bfxw9.net> declaimed
the following:
ARM is really a CPU, not u-Controller. Different rules.
M-series chips fill the role of microcontroller meant to run without an OS (or something like FreeRTOS) direct from flash memory; the A-series (application) are meant to be OS-based computer systems with complicated
boot sequences <G> (just look at most R-Pi systems -- where the /graphics processor/ is used to configure the ARM memory map before turning over control).
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
A fuckin Raspberry Pi would have been considered a
SUPERCOMPUTER back in the 70s.
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
On Thu, 10 Aug 2023 11:12:05 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
Nope - but it's not quite as it sounds for details see this patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2077559A2/en
TL;DR reading does degrade the storage in flash memory which means
it needs to be rewritten before it degrades too much, which takes thousands to millions of reads depending on the type of cell.
Yes, that is what I found, also. Essentially a read is between ten and
a thousand times less destructive than a write.
But in the context of a PI running Raspios or other Linux, with adequate
RAM, 99.99% of reads will be from cache, not the card, anyway. So you
can safely ignore this theoretical issue
On 8/10/23 3:13 PM, Rich wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote: >>> On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
It is, at least as a general statement in regards to flash memory.
There may be /some/ flash "drives" (used generically to refer to SD and
SATA disks) where if the controller detects an issue with the read, it
may decide to reallocate the data to another set of flash cells.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
Consider the source....
I suspect he has mixed up flash technology with DRAM technology, where
reading a row from DRAM
"Flash" is a "smart device". It has a controller.
One function is "wear-leveling", but another is
"rewrite on read". YOU never see this stuff.
On 8/10/23 6:12 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
Look it up. I don't have time to do all your research.
YOU don't do the re-write, the logic for that
it is built into the flash device, hidden in the
background.
Reading kinda blanks what's there, and then it has to be re-writ.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
Well, have fun with the bollocks ...
I was there long before any of this tech was
invented, learned the good AND bad. A lot of
the bad has been *disappeared* of late ...
"Flash" is not just some dumb memory chip despite
how it tries to present itself to the user, it
has a CONTROLLER. One function is "wear-leveling"
but another underlying function is the "re-write
on read" aspect.
On Thu, 10 Aug 2023 11:12:05 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
Nope - but it's not quite as it sounds for details see this
patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2077559A2/en
TL;DR reading does degrade the storage in flash memory which
means it needs to be rewritten before it degrades too much, which
takes thousands to millions of reads depending on the type of cell.
On Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:21:01 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Yes, that is what I found, also. Essentially a read is between ten and
a thousand times less destructive than a write.
But in the context of a PI running Raspios or other Linux, with adequate
RAM, 99.99% of reads will be from cache, not the card, anyway. So you
can safely ignore this theoretical issue
You pretty much have to ignore it anyway it's all internal to the device where you have no access to change anything.
In comp.os.linux.misc 23k.304 <23k304@bfxw9.net> wrote:
On 8/10/23 3:13 PM, Rich wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote: >>>> On 10/08/2023 06:41, 23k.304 wrote:
No such thing as "read only" with SD/Flash tech.
Even reading them means re-writing them. Really !
I believe that to be completely wrong.
It is, at least as a general statement in regards to flash memory.
There may be /some/ flash "drives" (used generically to refer to SD and
SATA disks) where if the controller detects an issue with the read, it
may decide to reallocate the data to another set of flash cells.
And unless you can provide some sort of evidence to back up that
assertion, I have to say I consider it utter bollocks
Consider the source....
I suspect he has mixed up flash technology with DRAM technology, where
reading a row from DRAM
"Flash" is a "smart device". It has a controller.
One function is "wear-leveling", but another is
"rewrite on read". YOU never see this stuff.
More utter bollocks from the nymshifting troll.
DRAM's rewrite on reads - flash does not.
On 11/08/2023 13:20, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:21:01 +0100
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Yes, that is what I found, also. Essentially a read is between ten
and a thousand times less destructive than a write.
But in the context of a PI running Raspios or other Linux, with
adequate RAM, 99.99% of reads will be from cache, not the card,
anyway. So you can safely ignore this theoretical issue
You pretty much have to ignore it anyway it's all internal to
the device where you have no access to change anything.
Well not exactly, the argument was about minimising reads as well as
writes to minimise wear.
On 11/08/2023 13:20, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:21:01 +0100Well not exactly, the argument was about minimising reads as well as
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Yes, that is what I found, also. Essentially a read is between ten
and a thousand times less destructive than a write.
But in the context of a PI running Raspios or other Linux, with
adequate RAM, 99.99% of reads will be from cache, not the card,
anyway. So you can safely ignore this theoretical issue
You pretty much have to ignore it anyway it's all internal to
the device where you have no access to change anything.
writes to minimise wear.
My point was to get back from armchair theorising to practicalities.
In practice the disk cache reduces regular reads issues to the card,
to zero.
On 07/08/2023 12:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:
No Empire Has Lasted Yet in history, US is way over the hill.Yes, these 19th century Empires are a bit passé..the end of Russian federation, the European Union, the United states - all are possible and more, or less likely as time moves on.
Likely Texas will soon leave that Union... the others will follow.
In an unlikely turn of phrase, in rapidly changing world contexts, they
are simply too big to survive.
What suits downtown New York does not suit wilderness Utah. And vice versa.
federalisation at least and possible independence, whilst maintaining
overall ties under some NATO and Interpol style pan national
organisations would seem to be the way forward
Secondly stop systemd spamming /var/log/syslog with all sorts of
crap you have no interest in. Create a file called /etc/rsyslog.d/drop.systemd.conf containing
# Drop messages from f***ing systemd
:programname,startswith,"systemd" stop
| Sysop: | Coz |
|---|---|
| Location: | Anoka, MN |
| Users: | 2 |
| Nodes: | 4 (0 / 4) |
| Uptime: | 190:45:59 |
| Calls: | 184 |
| Calls today: | 1 |
| Files: | 5,413 |
| Messages: | 222,750 |
