Turns out the status quo of Linux memory management somehow works pretty damn okay, nobody seems to really know why, and nobody cares.

59 points

Looks like your CS degree is actually teaching you CS stuff.

If all you wanted to do is center divs for 50$/h or so, a 2 months bootcamp would’ve been more than sufficient.

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73 points

Except that the degree I did this for was in electrical engineering :(

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-23 points

I understand. Safety and stability of embedded software is clearly overrated.

Why learn about stack overflow. Tomorrow some kid will press the “open” button on your device, will get rejected 64 times, and on the 65th the locking mechanism will crash. Makes sense to me.

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42 points
*

Get a nice cup of tea and calm down. I literally never said or implied any of that. Why do you feel that you need to personally attack me in particular?

All I said was that a supposedly easy topic turned into reading a lot of obscure code and papers which weren’t really my field at the time.

For the record, I am well aware that the state of embedded system security is an absolute joke and I’m waiting for the day when it all finally halts and catches fire.

But that was just not the topic of this work. My work was efficient memory management under a lot of (specific) constraints, not memory safety.

Also, the root problem is NP-hard, so good luck finding a universal solution that works within real-life resource (chip space, power, price…) limits.

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23 points

Just run memmaker.exe?

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10 points
*

you just gave me a panic attack about trying to get ultima underworld II and Star Wars: TIE Fighter to run

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5 points

You have 57 minutes left to work it out…

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5 points

not my bedtime!

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3 points

I was maintaining a custom autoexec.bat just for TIE Fighter.

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2 points

For me I loved the challenge of squeezing out a few extra k of lower memory. My autoexec.bat had four hundred lines in it.

I miss those days honestly. There’s really not much practical benefit to overclocking anymore, even broke college kid level devices come with at least 8 gigs of ram.

8… gigs… of ram… and ALL of it treated like lower memory… Could you imagine that in the mid 90s? I’d be thinking star trek.

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1 point
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I learned so much in those days about the outrageously absurd, efficiency of code and concatenation and stupid little things. Early days of coding and even scripting through these silly difficulties shaped us in ways we can’t even recognize now.

It was all about solving puzzles using primitive tools and incompatible systems just so we could play simple games. I’m reading articles now about how Gen Z doesn’t even know how to type, lol.

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15 points

you had me at P!=NP

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14 points

I use/admin Linux each and every day at a professional level and at least once a week I’m final panel doggo.

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10 points

I feel this. Fell into a similar rabbit hole when I tried to get realtime feedback on the program’s own memory usage, discerning stuff like reserved and actually used virtual memory. Felt like black magic and was ultimately not doable within the expected time constraints without touching the kernel I suppose. Spent too much time on that and had to move on with no other solution than to measure/compute the allocated memory of the largest payload data types.

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3 points

I’ve had to explain so many times how text pages work with copy on write semantics.

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