Implementing chmod -c (going through some very old requests) I used a dirty trick where I replaced stderr with the read end of a pipe. That way I don't depend on /dev/null being present, and if I used the WRITE end of the pipe there's the possibility the pipe could fill up on a chmod -R or similar. The read end isn't writeable and will just silently discard each write (with an error we don't check for).

It's one of those things where I want to add a comment explaining it, but also want the code to be simple and obvious and thus don't want to go off on an unrelated tangent explaining a Linux thing, not a chmod thing...

Hit a fun little gcc bug implementing that TOYFLAG_BIGHELP idea: if you #include the same file more than once (such as the NEED_OPTIONS trick I copied for NEED_TRIMHELP in main.c), the include stack it gives you is from the FIRST place that file was #included, so it's really hard to tell what it's complaining about when it does the "suggest parentheses around & and |" warning if you remove the parentheses around "flags" in the #define NEWTOY for trimhelp. The warning seems to reach back in time and make an EARLIER #include fail, because it's reporting the wrong line number for the #include from main.c, because there can be only one.

I have encountered a problem with toybox's help text format: I want to put for i in /sys/class/*/*/dev; do echo -n "$(basename $(dirname $i)) "; cat $i; done as an example shell snippet in mknod's help (to show all the devices currently available in this kernel) but that has /* and */ in it which are C comment indicators. The help text is in the C source file, which means it's inside a big C comment, and the in-band signaling would END the C comment. I have not implemented an escape syntax to break those up. Kinda not worth it for one instance? Hmmm...

Dialed in to Tim Bird's linux boot time optimization SIG meeting. Of course nobody's done anything on compile time elimination of unnecessary printk() strings. (One of the largest size savings in Matt Mackall's old -tiny tree back before there was no such person.) Nobody's done anything about adding a CONFIG_SIMPLE_DMESG where we can get the old simple string ring buffer back without wasting 5 times as much space on gratuitous metadata as on the actual logged strings. I mentioned my fdpic for ssh with mmu patch but nobody was interested. At one point we sauntered past "the fast way to boot 15 years ago was to abuse the suspend-to-ram and live migration stuff (kind of like ciru for VMs instead of containers), and several other people on the call chimed in "oh yeah, we've done that too" but there's no documentation on it and nothing went upstream, and of course it was dropped and we moved on...

*shrug* The usual. Linux kernel development's toxic enough nobody really wants to engage with upstream anymore (even BEFORE Linus decided that what the kernel really needed was a bunch of rust people waging an inquisition against every heretic who refuses to convert), and the Linux foundation very effectively drove away the hobbyists who used to fill in the gaps, leaving a bunch of employees uninterested in working on anything that isn't THEIR job.

I guess this is what the end of the enlightenment felt like. No longer are "gentlemen of leisure" self-taught from books and going out into the field to advance the state of the art, now you need a bunch of certifications and permissions for tenured university factulty to listen to you. Sadly, as predicted, although computer programming speed-ran that in a few decades. (I refuse to call it "computer science" when you can't reproduce stuff from first principles in a lab, your unpublished trade secrets made once and then copied exactly by rote are computer alchemy. So many of the shared libraries people pull in are basically a digital form of Ringer's Solution, who cares WHY it works, just do it...)

So bug report du jour about the build breaking because getentropy() isn't found. I'm already checking for the header's existence. Unfortunately there's no #ifdef equivalent for function prototypes, so "header exists but doesn't provide the definitions we need" is hard to spot/fix without a compile time probe, and I've been trying to move away from those.

This is actually an android/bionic issue, providing the header but not a function that should be in that header. Which Android already fixed, but API 28 came out in 2018 and our 7 year time horizon policy says we probably SHOULD still support the old stuff for another year or so. For Android specifically I've always let Elliott handle that, but now somebody hit a thing. (Trying to build for an android emulator, which maybe I should look more into because it would be nice to be able to test android stuff on my laptop more thoroughly. A full AOSP build on this laptop is many hours, and there's no obvious "make baseline" that gives me a command line version without the gui because Android generally isn't a server OS.)

That said, there's probably some sort of "#ifdef ANDROID && API_LEVEL<28" I could add as a second wrapper around the existing #ifdef. A quick grep of the NDK-r27 is finding __INTRODUCED_IN(__api_level) and include/android/api-level.h:#define __ANDROID_API_J_MR1__ 17 and similar.

It would be nice if there was an Android Programmer's Manual. I was SO spoiled by the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide in my early teens, that thing was a masterpiece. Half the reason I got into unix (Rutgers transitioned its "each costs as much as a car" workstations from SunOS to Solaris while I was there, and then there was Linux) was that the OS/2 EMX package, a port of gcc+glibc to OS/2 circa 1992, had a glibc reference guide (basically the man 3 pages glued together) that I printed out on clam.rutgers.edu's printer and sewed together with black thread from mom's sewing kit to make a sort of book out of it. Back at timesys in 2006 I printed out the tinycc source and the bash man page in separate 3 ring binders, to read on my daily bus commute. Yeah, old school, but old school worked for a reason. Survivorship bias: the stuff that didn't work isn't even remembered, and thus isn't "old school".

There's some tension between commands being self-contained and plumbing being available in lib/*.c. In addition to the new blake3 stuff I need to wire up, the sha3sum plumbing is in its own command file, not in the newer lib/hash.c.

It's a bit like how toys/other/bzcat.c has the bzcat extract plumbing, but lib/deflate.c has the gzip plumbing. (Because zip/unzip also needs to use that, but only bzcat and friends use bzip2. Which implies that if I get around to mksquashfs, it'll only support gzip and not newer algorithms, but that was already the case because I'm only implementing the compression side of gzip, the others are decompress only. Deflate is the 80/20 of compression algorithms: it doesn't produce the smallest result for long term archiving but it's way better than nothing, churns through data rapidly, takes very little memory, is trivially parallelizeable if you just "grab the next 4 megabytes of input and fling it to a child process, rinse repeat", and works as a streaming algorithm without needing a minimum input buffer size which is why things like ssh -C use it.

But in this case, now I know that man 5 crypt has different information than man 3 crypt, I want all the hashing algorithms available to the new lib/crypt.c. Hmmm, possibly I should rename lib/hash.c to lib/crypt.c when adding the actual crypt() function...

Second big protest. Less well-organized than the first. I mentioned I couldn't figure out when it was supposed to start. (The 515151 website is like meetup, on tuesday it only wanted to tell me about protests happening wednesnay, not the supposedly big thing for the weekend. Every event is equally important, no matter how small, and unless I gave it personal identifying data it wanted to tell me about things 50 miles away with an expected attendance of 3 people because that was up next chronologically.)

The day of, Fade found out "when to show up". (Possibly from a coworker? Dunno, I'd griped at her in passing and she came back with the info later.) Last time it was noon, this time it was 1pm. Except that was still wrong: the 1pm thing was for a march far away ENDING at the capital at 2pm. So we left early (because the green line had melted last time) and got on fairly lightly attended trains with only one other person having a sign for the rally (last time there were like 50), and then we showed up to the capital which had like 5% of the crowd of last time. So that was disheartening.

We stuck around anyway. Several of the people who did show up had brought dogs, and the music was good: Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" and the Artists Formerly Known as Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl" and one where the chorus was "we have the guillotines". More people did trickle in over time, and then when the march showed up that tripled the already increased crowd size, so in the end it was decent turnout. (Still not quite as big as last time, but that was right after the tariffs went in and they did a MUCH better job getting the word out, and a lot of the people who'd marched went straight on home when it ended. And there _are_ a bunch of other protests happening, this time we got flyers for like 3 different ones each claiming to be "the next protest", except on different days and for different causes. Two people were holding a "Legalize nudity" flag but when I asked them they didn't seem to know what AANR _was_, nor where any of the local clubs were. They'd started their own group in 2017. Good for them I suppose. The guy with the hammer and sickle flag over his booth booth trying to hand pamphlets about marxism _did_ admit that trying to reclaim communism from Putin using Joseph Stalin's symbol might not be the most effective approach to convincing people "hey remember FDR's New Deal? Let's do more of that, maybe add some of that Basic Income Richard Nixon tried to pass in 1970." I mean DUDE, seriously...)

By the time the marchers showed up, both the marchers and the people who'd been waiting for them were pretty tired, and even before they showed up the guy with the microphone kept trying to get the crowd to chant in unison by including evil bastards' names in the chants (imagine a 1930's german anti-nazi rally where you try to get the OPPOSITION to yell "hitler" and "gobbels" repetedly in unison. Please stop, you're making us uncomfortable.) Right after a "vietnam veteran" was given the microphone to "read his poetry" (the poems seemed to imply he was native american, but if the introduction mentioned it I missed it), and then the same guy went through his uninspiring name-and-shame chants again the crowd was breaking up and I left. (People drive a hundred miles to hear AOC and Bernie speak. This one would have gone better if they kept the music playing and stopped trying to have people speak.)

One the way back I stopped by the place that'd had checkerboard tea (technically it's "Loire River assam") last time, but they hadn't restocked since I went back and bought the 8 cans had last week. (I drank all but one of them since, it's good stuff.) I asked if they were still carrying it or if tariffs had happened (they took the sticker off the empty shelf where it had been), and after a couple referrals talked to a guy who said they never knew when that was coming in. Which is pretty much what the HEB people said back in the day: it's a brand from Taiwan and apparently shipping stuff from Taiwain is... irregular.

I want a "yes" variant that can output controllable repeated data, because often I need an endless stream of spaces or plus signs or some such, or want a stream of NUL bytes in a context where I'm not sure /dev/null is mounted.

Alas "yes" is the wrong tool for this because A) it can't output NUL bytes (no \0 parsing, the shell can't do it because argv[] is NUL terminated C strings), B) there's no way to tell it NOT to stick a newline between each output cycle.

The tool that CAN output NUL bytes and write data without a newline is printf, so had an "add printf -y" todo item, and at a quick glance it looks straightforward (it's already got an endless loop to consume argv[], just add an if (FLAG(y)) to reset argv instead of breaking out at the end. Don't see any obvious memory leaks...)

And look:

$ printf -y
bash: printf: -y: invalid option
printf: usage: printf [-v var] format [arguments]

Except...

$ /usr/bin/printf -y

Once again, gnu/dammit inconsistently shipping multiple incompatible GPLv3 implementations. Hmmm...

$ /usr/bin/printf --help
Usage: /usr/bin/printf FORMAT [ARGUMENT]...
...
Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/printf>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) printf invocation'

AHA! So it's ALREADY not safe to call even the non-bash printf for random "$VAR" strings. So adding (only parsed before the pattern) isn't a big lift.

I need a cron job that rebuilds all the mkroot targets using current toybox git and linux git running the result under current qemu git. It has to not only do it three times (updating toybox, linux, and qemu between each run) but bisect when a target fails between the last known good version of the repo it just updated and the current one, and then probably email me an infodump with the failure analysis. (Commit X of package Y caused the mkroot build/test log for these architectures to fail, here's the relevant log(s).)

There's a question of rebuild granularity: if only one target fails then qemu doing "./configure --target-list=$ARCH-softmmu" would speed the rebuild up quite a lot, same for toybox "mkroot/mkroot.sh CROSS=$ARCH: building just the one arch when bisecting linux kernel issues. But when it's a generic issue affecting multiple architectures, that would be more work by bisecting multiple architectures for basically the same issue. In theory, on an average night it should all just work, and whether I'd set this up on j180 (32-way x86-64 box in japan) or finally get the orange pi 3b setup (which is an arm64 machine with 8 gigs ram and something like 4x cpu), either way it should kick off something like midnight and run unattended.

And there's the problem of what to do if I haven't fixed yesterday's issues yet. The build failing again for basically the same reason isn't useful to bisect, although marking a package "bad" and bisecting the other two against the last known good version might make sense. I'd have to manually clear the "bad" flag. Or it could just try current git once and notice it's working again and clear it itself, but otherwise NOT bisect?

Ok, I admit I'm impressed by the emotional manipulation in this spam, going for the "switch from anxiety to relief" emotional manipulation of dementia-addled geezers. It's pure evil, but I admire the craftsmanship.

The subject "FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, DC" (all caps!) with a header about ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONEY CRIMES DIVISION and then mailing address headers like postal mail used to have, and a first sentence "We have finally completed an investigation with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network system, your E-mail address was among the email that Won the UK National lottery Award which you did not claim..."

And then going on to explain the scam, how "the FBI" caught someone stealing uncollected lottery-you-never-entered winnings, which they are now ready to transfer to the rightful owner as soon as you sign over your banking info. You'd think nobody could EVER FALL FOR THAT, but Altzheimers patients deep into confabulation feeling a sudden flood of relief from having their emotions jerked around is EXACTLY who could be convinced that they'd entered a lottery they don't remember entering, and their life savings give them deep pockets to drain, or if nothing else, a fixed income means there's _something_ to steal. As with all those weird infomercials for devices to help you put on socks without bending over, they don't SAY it's aimed at end-of-life care patients but if you weight the age sex pyramid by the average net worth by age it's crystal clear where the motherlode of dumb money is.

It's a pity it's also the motherlode of dumb political power, ever since the "clean cup move down" tea party initially just intended to shift the overton window snowballed into something the real grifters could weaponize. As with the spammers inventing crypto to pyramid scheme younger marks, they're trying VERY HARD to seem like their ecosystem is bigger than just addled geezers, but once enough dementia droolers die off what's left is unlikely to be self-sustaining.

Sadly, we've got another decade of Booming. And even that won't entirely fix it: the decline of leaded gasoline is fairly recent. Richard Nixon created the EPA in 1970, which mandated catalytic converters (requiring unleaded gasoline) on all new US cars sold starting in 1975, which rapidly reduced US lead emissions into the atmosphere (173 tons in 1970, 131 tons in 1975, 61 tons in 1980, 19 tons in 1985, 11 tons in 1986, 4 tons in 1987...). Although "amount in the environment" (and in people's bodies) trails emissions by a few years so people were still being poisoned by this crap through the early 1990s (although not NEARLY as bad as in 1970). Which means even people born in 1970 got a pretty bad pediatric and chronic dose.

I was born in very rural florida upwind of orlando, with swamp and the gulf of mexico upwind of me for hundreds of miles. Then we moved to Kwajalein in the middle of the pacific ocean (freshest air on the planet) when I was 5 and stayed there until I was 10, and by the time I got back to the states emissions had already fallen around 80%. But I could still tell New Jersey was actively making me dumber, I just didn't understand why at the time. I did not escape unscathed, and do not expect to enjoy a productive retirement.

If Gen Z seems way smarter than the Boomers and Gen X it's because they ARE, due to massive pediatric and chronic lead poisoning. (No, microplastics don't count. Panic all you like about that, it's not the same order of magnitude. And the more "micro" it is the faster it does, in fact, chemically break down. If it can burn, it will oxidize over time. That's how chemistry works. More surface area means faster activity, and that's BEFORE nature takes notice of the giant piles of resources we've strewn about the place.)

But the Boomers got by far the biggest dose and thus got dumbest fastest as they went senile, and hopefully Gen X will on average stay lucid a few years longer than a corresponding Boomer, and thus spend fewer man-years voting fascist than an equivalent boomer (especially since there's fewer of us), and then millennials may wind up the age of Trump or Pelosi before they become fully toxic...

*shrug* I cling to hope where I can find it. The Boomers will die, and the oldest of them are the worst of them. The younger half don't even want to be called Boomers. (And yes yes I know, hash tag not-all-boomers.)

Spent today either curled up in a ball from stress, or with an upset stomach. "Intestinal distress that reads as free-floating anxiety" is a thing I acquired from one of my bouts of Covid over the pandemic, and it is one of my least favorite states. It's a bit like how I never USED to get visual migranes, until that one bout with lidocane in 2013 and then suddenly my body had learned a new trick. So now that's a thing that occasionally happens.

It doesn't help that the mastodon server I have an account on has been down all day. Every time that happens I wonder if mstdn.jp permanently went away and I didn't hear about it because the announcement was on one of the japanese-only channels I STILL can't read. And of course the youtube algorithm has decided I need to see every "I know how we said last week was that THIS IS THE TIPPING POINT INTO FASCISM? Well what happened THIS week is DEFINITELY it! Yet again! Somehow! We only have to be right once!" video copying its strategy from the climate change people. (Yes this is terrible. You convinced me some years ago we were already totally fscked. I notice you are saying this from the comfort of a chair in an air conditioned office that does not appear under immediate seige, and you are not offering any solutions or suggesting a specific course of action beyond phoning up Ilhan Omar's voicemail to let the black muslim woman know she should be even more alarmed than she already is, which I suppose is still an improvement over calling Ted Cruz's voicemail to let him know he's a bad person: he knew, he just didn't care as long as it got him money and power.)

The people who organized the protests on the 5th said the next ones would be on the 19th. They didn't say it at the time, but there were some rumblings later. Except when I tried to look up any details there were none. At all. Not even from their official website. Just... maybe wander down to your state capital (around noon I guess? That's when last time started...) and see if anybody else shows up. Wear sunscreen and bring a beverage, because there was EXACTLY one food truck last time that wanted $7 for french fries.

The point of torches and pitchforks was people coming after the physical safety of their oppressors. France did not remove Louis XIV from office via changes to tax policy. The american revolution didn't JUST dump tea into the harbor. (And the rich white slaveowning cowards who did it dressed up as native americans so the british would double down on the ongoing racist genocide instead of blaming THEM, how is it a protest if you hide why you're doing it...) A couple months back South Korea rose up and literally grabbed the guns out of the hands of their army. Almost nobody around here appears ready for even peaceful direct action. I'm honestly unsure what the "down with this sort of thing then" middle ground is supposed to accomplish against somebody who cheats on all cylinders to pack the supreme court and then ignores even them, backed by a senate (the part of american politics where land DOES vote, that's literally what it's for) which has abdicated all responsibility, who are using ICE as america's SS to grab people off the street and we respond with strongly worded letters to the editor.

The Bernie/AOC rallies drawing five figures each stop (they got like 8 thousand people in MONTANA, and I didn't think it even HAD that many) serve an excellent purpose if the stress they cause Nanci Pelosi and Chuck Schumer hasten those assholes' deaths by even 5 minutes. (Which is the only way either is leaving office. I don't really blame the fascist 27% of the population for this: they're terrible but they've always been there and didn't CHANGE, the anti-abortion loons were asassinating medical practitioners 50 years ago). And it's not ENTIRELY the fault of the lead-addled altzheimers patients fueling all the elder abuse scams (hence why the phone rings off the hook and my spam filter has gotten hundreds of blindingly obvious theft attempts each day for 20 years). Both (overlapping) groups are horrible in the way rabies is horrible; they have no agency and could not have decided to do or be better. Measles isn't responsible for the rise in measles, Brain Worm Guy is. I don't BLAME hurricane Katrina for what happened to New Orleans. What CHANGED is Pelosi and Schumer dicking around 4 years after the capital was stormed on January 6, doing nothing whatsoever to impose any consequences on orange man bad despite the target rich environment. They did to him what he's doing to the Dictator of Equador, "clearly I have no power over you, I've fallen and I can't get up".

Pelosi and Schumer (D-Goldman Sachs) focused all their efforts on stopping people like Bernie and AOC who noted that coming out of the previous Gilded Age, the choices were fascism or the New Deal, and went "here's a new new deal, let's have a Roosevelt (Teddy or FDR, take your pick) instead of a Mussolini this time around please..." And Pelosi and Schumer went "over our dead bodies, no literally, ask Dianne Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg". Pelosi's personal investments have beat the stock market soundly. Biden sent a strongly worded letter to the editor but not executive orders. The supreme court ruled the president was not liable for breaking the law as part of his duties, and Biden did absolutely nothing with that power when it was HANDED TO HIM. Instead of "be careful what you wish for", Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer teed it up for the fascists. THAT is what actually CHANGED. Ronald Reagan was trying to do the exact same things the first trump administration tried, George Carlin did a whole set about it in 1988. (Or McCarthyism and the Comstock Act a generation before then.) What's different this time is the democratic gerontocracy SURRENDERED.

Honestly, orange man bad's strategy has been "double down every time you lose" ever since he was a local new jersey real estate swindler back before he bankrupted his first casino. George Plimpton mocked him on the Disney channel when I was still in grade school (drumpf called himself "The Donald" back in the 80's and Mousterpiece Theatre referred to Donald Duck as "The Donald" as a play on that). He got on the Forbes 500 list by pretending to be his own assistant and lying to the article's author on the phone (there are literally audio recordings of this online because the journalist taped his conversations to ensure he quoted accurately), then used his position ON that list to get bank loans. When his father died he stole all his siblings' inheritance (by making himself the trustee of the estate and then draining it despite what the will said). By the time he ran through that money the soviet union had collapsed and he could get into the "money laundering for Russia" business. That's why he had so many bankruptcies, yet kept getting new loans. Up until the Mortgage Crisis in 2008 the regulators didn't think to scrutinize people who claimed to have lost ALL their money, because hhow do you get rich by going bankrupt? So all you had to do to launder money was "borrow" a bunch of dirty money from an oligarch, send 95% of it back by "buying" stuff from the people you "borrowed" it from, then declare bankruptcy to make the "debt" go away. The launderers even got a tax writeoff for their "loss". THAT is why he could go bankrupt so many times and still have oligarchs lining up to loan him money through obscure eastern european branches of Deutsche Bank. (I could sprinkle all this with a bunch of supporting links but... none of this is SECRET. They don't even bother DENYING most of it. As with the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape, it's the mob standard "yeah, waddya gonna do about it?") That laundering is how he became "Agent Krasnov", a useful idiot who was easy to steer and surround with russian agents because he didn't CARE what anyone else's real motive was as long as he got what he wanted out of the immediate transaction. (And that was before his senility robbed him of object permanence, just like Reagan before him. The right wing loves confidence, and the one thing more confident than a confidence trickster is a nouveau riche white male geezer who literally can't remember ever having been wrong about anything, because of the altzheimers. The right wing role model is Mr. Magoo.)

The fact he kept running out of money ANYWAY is on him. 90% of the consequences he's ever faced were self-inflicted, because he was incompetent BEFORE he went senile. And yes he's already deep into dementia (progressive supranuclear palsy): the reason his father got diagnosed with altzheimers at 86 was he could no longer remember his own birthday. That's not the START of the problem, that's just when his wealth and power and the layer of protective suck-ups in deep denial could no longer HIDE the fact that he wasn't functional even as a figurehead with an entourage trying to carry out his every whim. The white house is the ultimate enabling senior care facility, which he is well aware of. As they say, every accusation a confession.

Anyway, it's probably just digestive trouble.

Got the new scripts/kconfig.c writing out a reasonable defconfig that diffed the same as the old one (except for the header comments), but changing the build plumbing over raises the question of what should live where. Right now kconfig/Makefile (which I wrote to drive the ported plumbing) is handling all the config targets and help text, and this is the one area where the Makefile ISN'T a trivial wrapper around a scripts/blah.sh giving you the option to NOT use make. I already have a scripts/genconfig.sh creating generated/Config.in and generated/Config.probed, and logically I could add allyesconfig/allnoconfig/defconfig targets to it. (And the macos/bsd/android defconfigs targets would be autodetected by genconfig.sh using cc macro checks. I still need to teach all this to read an existing .config and do the miniconfig thing.

But the new kconfig binary is _also_ writing out generated/help.h which used to be done by a different special purpose binary (scripts/config2help.c), and I switched over the scripts/make.sh plumbing that was doing that to build the new binary and run it (kconfig -h). And now that kconfig is writing help.h probably scripts/genconfig.sh should just write out generated/help.h when it runs? Now that there's one binary (generated/unstripped/kconfig) producing all the various types of output.

Yesterday's comment about menuconfig wanting to use "less" plumbing (and "watch", and "nano", and...) out of lib/*.c... Right now this new kconfig isn't pulling in any lib/*.c code. I wrote a new strany(), and am using the non-x malloc() and strdup() and friends because if kconfig segfaults I really don't care. (You'd pretty much have to be running it on a nommu system for that to happen anyway, which doesn't seem like a common use case. Even though we _did_ get jcore's gcc self-hosting! (There's an sh2eb-native compiler which I have run on turtle, although not recently. Yes I distribute the native compilers as squashfs images because that's what mkroot needs to do native builds, there's an unsquashfs that extracts them like an archive if you don't want to mount it.)

I got poked about a fix for a bug in the old kconfig binary from the dawn of time, which was inherited from my tenure at busybox, where I'd copied it from the 2.6 kernel (replacing the even older snapshot Eric Anderson had copied via uClibc).

I've mostly turned down similar bug reports in the past because I don't want to touch the legacy gpl code cordoned off in its own subdirectory, I want to _replace_ it. And I am now doing so. But turning down this bug report does mean I need to prioritize getting a replacement menuconfig in before too much longer. (Probably an endless scroling version rather than a modal descent into menus sort of thing. Linux may have ten nested menu levels that would go off the right edge of the screen without resets, but the total indentation level in toybox isn't that deep. I probably don't even need to implement scrolling right (at least not quite yet). In theory that plumbing should be part of less (and would have been part of my vi implementation if I'd gotten to do one. I should do a "nano" or something...)

The recurring rabid spam filters false positiving on landley.net do make my own manual spam filtering a touch frustrating, because "your email is borked" is no longer a category I can delete without reading the first line of. The zillion senior health scams (Deserts that fight diabetes! "Inch boosting jelly"! One simple trick to restore eyesight!) and uber-generic "your package is ready for pickup, don't ask what or where" and "we would like to purchase whatever your product is" I can still read with the D key. (They're back to saying that "Mr. Bill Gates" and random african banks are trying to give away money, I guess orange man bad has sufficiently reasserted itself even among the drooling vegetable crowd. At least the ones that still have any money.)

But the endless flood of email hijack attempts have a small sliver I need to glance at the first line of, and it's not the time this takes that I mind (still a fraction of a second), it's that there's a nonzero chance I'll miss a real report about spam̈haus̈ du jour̈ categorizing my last name as sexual innuendo or some such.

And it's back. Mirabilos (the mksh maintainer) informed me that some european anti-spam DNS servers(?) don't resolve "landley.net" which is presumably yet another manifestation of the same issue that was false positiving ublock.

I made a hammer in 2013. Somebody made a rootkit using my hammer, which left hammer marks on it (because old gcc was dirty and leaked crap into the binaries it built). Lazy antivirus writers used the hammer mark as a sig for the virus. Then further laziness genericized that to blame me, personally.

(It was something like either gcc 4.2 or binutils 2.17 added the compile-time $PWD where the compiler got built/installed into the library search path, so even though I made a wrapper to make the compiler run from any directory you extracted the binaries into, it still leaked "/home/landley/someworkdir" into the resulting ELF files _that_ built. And when some virus writer downloaded my toolchain, Witchsmeller Pursuivant went "oh look, a unique string I've never seen before! That must mean virus! Of course I won't google it or anything," and I got blamed.)

I vaguely recall that ublock inherited this mistake from some german spam filter house, which I've never been able to talk to because A) ich nicht sprecht keine deutch (got an F on it in high school, did ok the first year then remembered NOTHING after summer break, and no it did not "come back" as the new year progressed), B) they're high on their own supply so if you're in their spam filter they can't receive email from you (nicely circular). I dunno if the recent gitlab whitelisting was at the ublock level or the people ublock got it from.

The sad part is if you host stuff on big services like faceboot or substack you don't run into this. Nobody's going to block @gmail.com. It's trying to do the small independent with an rss feed thing that you face a constant stream of low-level harassment FROM THE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOMINALLY ON YOUR SIDE. Purity culture strikes again. Big tent? No: cleanse the flock, keep the infidel out... Sigh.

I thought I could work out a good morning laptop schedule where I go to the apartment front office until they start mopping, then pack up and head to fresh thyme and use the tables there (with the price of admission being a $2 box of their hot food area's chicken strips), and thus stay out and away from Everbark Hysteridog, Loudest of His Line until at least noon. (Fade doesn't THINK he barks when he's locked in the bedroom with nobody to hear him. It's one of them "if a tree falls on a florist, does he make a sound" things.) Alas, the mopping happens between 9am and 9:30, and the chicken strips are never out before 10am and when I was there today they still weren't out at 10:30 when I gave up waiting. (Sitting at a table without having bought something seems rude: capitalism has eliminated "third places" that you can just go unless I want to spend $2 each way on the green line to reach a library. The apartment's front office is something my rent pays for access to, like the tiny little gym area.)

I thought maybe I could pace around the stadium working on my daily 10k step goal in between, but my cataracts have gotten bad enough that trying to watch anything with the sun up, even in shade, is eyestrain city. (I envy people with access to non-US healthcare. Yes I have health insurance. No I don't trust it, it's just a saving throw against poverty when you wind up in the emergency room, it doesn't help for luxury bones like teeth or optional surgeries like being able to read for more than 10 minutes at a time.)

Alright, how DOES .config file loading work? The "Config.in" files define a tree of data structures, and then .config applies state to them, but there's dependencies in there. Dependencies are MOSTLY later symbols depending on earlier symbols (that's how indentation is handled in menuconfig, a symbol that depends on the symbol before it gets indented), but a symbol can also depend on later symbols. Symbols are saved in .config from top to bottom, so loading can set a symbol before setting its dependency, meaning that set to something disabled by a later dependency either gets discarded or has to be remembered and handled in a second pass?

Yet despite this, miniconfig constantly fights with guard symbols because when I enable a symbol that's inside a menu, the menu does not automatically get enabled. (Menus are implicit dependencies. Well, glancing at linux-6.14's mm/Kconfig "menuconfig" is both menu and symbol, which is terminated by "endchoice". Was it always that bad? I'd think I'd remember if it was always that bad...) Hmmm, no, judging by drivers/net/ethernet/broadcom/Kconfig (which is the kind of symbol I usually have trouble with), it looks like there's just a gratuitous config NET_VENDOR_BROADCOM and then all the symbols under that have an explicit "depends" (and a bunch of "selects") so what LOOKS like an expanding menu is just dynamic dependency visibility.

Which says what I really want for miniconfig is for symbol enablement to traverse "depends" backwards and switch those _on_, whatever I need for this symbol to be enabled. (Which in the case of multiple X | Y | Z dependencies is non-obvious, but it could handle the simple cases.) Alas, that's not how kconfig dependencies work in linux, they're one way gates going the other way. But if you switch a dependency on after switching on an earlier symbol, it remembers that the symbol WOULD be enabled if not suppressed, and once unblocked the symbol does enable. Which is uncomfortably magic.

Sigh, making my new code traverse and set simple dependencies would mean MY menuconfig would be simpler (one pass, no implicit remembering), but incompatible with what the kernel does. And I don't do a lot of that kind of guard symbol nonsense anyway, so it doesn't really help me either. Compatibility probably wins here, unless I can write a tool that parses the kernel's Config.in tree and produces a usable .config file so I don't have to use the legacy plumbing for miniconfig in kernel configs in mkroot. (Except they also generate a bunch of .h files in their tool instead of having the Makefile call sed, which seems like a layering violation...)

I think what's happening is the state assignment is being made (the state read in from .config is remembered), and the dependencies are resolved when display the data in menuconfig or write it out into a new .config. So the symbol IS enabled, but doesn't display as such when you examine it. (Maybe? Except they'd have to be resolved transitively, "y" depends on "y" depends on "n" so they're all "n". Possibly with recursion detecting for circular dependencies, although that's pilot error.)

I don't currently have any "selects", and grep says all my depends are just on A) SYMBOL, B) !SYMBOL, C) SYMBOL || SYMBOL, D) SYMBOL && !SYMBOL. (Oddly all the current && have a ! on the second one.)

Aha! When I went through menuconfig yesterday looking for anything still needing the help merging, the reason I found nothing was because of my config. For example "mkfifo.c" conditionally adds -Z to the help text when you enable a security blanket. And passwd.c has the block of text about sad password heuristics. (That's why the old config2help.c read the .config file to write out the help #defines. I mean I knew I'd implemented quite elaborate plumbing to do all that, I just missed that there were still any users left.)

So id, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod add -Z for !TOYBOX_LSM_NONE, PASSWD adds PASSWD_SAD as a trailing paragraph, and WGET_LIBTLS has inappropriate help text that should NOT go into wget's --help (it's not phrased right to act as --help output) but maybe something should? And sort.c chops out -g when !TOYBOX_FLOAT.

Hmmm... I've thought about adding an escape syntax for a while where you could insert another %(CONFIG_SYMBOL)'s help text into this block of help text at an arbitrary point. (That makes all the paragraph parsing to split out "usage:", "-x options", and "description" sections go away, which was always brittle and magic.) But if show_help() was parsing that at runtime, then the other help text would need to be compiled in all the time. But all the config symbols get resolved at compile time, and if the new kconfig.c is parsing that then it needs to load .config to write generated/help.h which for 99% of the cases isn't needed. (Under the new code, generated/help.h is invariant regardless of .config, and it would be very nice ot keep that.)

I could just always document -Z and -g even when it's not there, and punt on the other two at the moment? (One of which is wrong and the other of which is conceptually disgusting anyway.)

Hmmm... or I could teach show_help() that it can suppress lines starting with, I dunno, an exclamation point. And have a show_help_filter() that takes a config symbol as an extra argument, and have show_help() be a wrapper that always passes "don't filter" to the filter argument? Either way the filter would be modifying the displayed text (even when it doesn't yank the whole line, it should yank the filter character). And the plumbing doesn't know what symbols go with which data, that would need to be some sort of TOYFLAG_HELPSYM(CFG_BLAH) macro setting... I dunno, TOYFLAG_BIGHELP? #define TOYFLAG_HELPSYM(x) (TOYFLAG_BIGHELP*x)

Since show_help() already has a "flags", this is sort of a HELP_EXTRA flag, ala "blah|(HELP_EXTRA*CFG_WHATSIS)" which would resolve at compile time. This doesn't scale to having MULTIPLE dependent config symbols affecting help text, but grep 'TOY(.*USE' toys/*/*.c is only finding the 5 instances of options dropping out, and going through all the unique "depends on" lines (grep -h depends\ on Config.in generated/Config.* | sort -u) only spotted the two added paragraphs, neither of which suppressed an option. There's "room for future expansion" and there's "philosophy of consistent behavior" fighting here: config symbols that change behavior are something I'm trying to AVOID these days...

I wanted to search my old mastodon posts, so I downloaded my archive and was once again reminded that the file format is TERRIBLE. "human readable text" doesn't matter quite so much when the entire file is ONE BIG UNBROKEN LINE, so you can't usefully open it in vi or use grep or similar. If I uuencode a binary the result is "human readable text", but being true isn't the same as being useful.

I googled (and then ecosia.org'd because google is useless now) for a mastodon archive viewer (or a converter to plain text, or just something to break the json into an indented data tree with one key:value pair per line, or even just line breaks BETWEEN RECORDS, but unfortunately most of the hits are for things like "online viewers", meaning you upload your data to a random website that breaks it down for you on their servers after selling it to advertisers and training AI on it. No: I have a data file I want to convert it into a useful format locally on my machine.

Last time I applied sed to get "ugly but greppable" (basically just inserting line breaks between records, which WAS NONTRIVIAL), and this time I'd like an actual tool. The main downside is I need to import a json parser, which is not a thing I want to do in C for a quick-and-dirty tool (I'd spend longer learning/debugging the library API than writing new code), and there's not a lot of bash ones either, so...

The main recommendation seems to be a project which is a fork of a fork, and alas that oldest project (last touched 7 years ago) is still python++ rather than python (sigh), but a quick glance doesn't look like spyware and when I ran it I did get a self-contained html file... in reverse order (oldest first, not what I'm used to for this data) with no links back to the actual tweet on mstdn.jp (the links are IN THE JSON, the converter just discarded them), which is generally what I'm trying to look up. (I want to link to an old mastodon post the way I link to old blog entries, "previously on"...) So I took a whack at modifying it, and... I forgot how persnickety python 3 is, and how many utterly pointless gratuitious changes it made. (The dictionary "status" has no member "status.id" you have to call status.get("id") because... reasons?)

But I still got it to work faster than writing my own from scratch. (I was HOPING for a python 2 tool that was a decent example of how to use the json library out of python's standard library, but no...)

I should probably have used this as an excuse to play with lua some more. (Apparently json is _almost_ valid lua, the trick is avoiding "bobby tables" problems when you import a malicious dataset that tries to escape and execute arbitrary code. Of course there's no standard lua library, but there are third party ones.) But I just wanted to get it done, and converting the json into data structures I could traverse still meant learning the format of mastodon data structures and assembling output, which the above python one already did _almost_ tolerably...

I was doing a "gethelp()" function to read the indented help text block after a "help" keyword, but you tell the block is over by reading a line that is NOT part of the block, meaning it needs to either return that line or unget it, and it was already returning the help text it read, so it probably makes more sense to do it in the main while getline() loop as a state machine state. So not a function, then.

The usual design balancing act: how much is this a quick and dirty tool to do the job in front of it, and how much is it scaffolding to tackle a larger problem in future? But infrastructure in search of a user is a bad thing, let's just write something now and worry about writing something else later. New code is easy to come up with.

Fade's spring break ended, and I headed out the same time she did this morning to go down to the shared office space near the apartment's front desk rather than suffer the Cling Of The Dog (and his superhero identity: Hysteridog Everbark). I did not bring my laptop charger, which puts a timer on this work session...

Working on a scripts/kconfig.c, which should probably eat scripts/config2help.c because these days I've mostly eliminated help text that straddles multiple config symbols. (Busybox did a ton of micromanaging, but toybox commands should have defined behavior. You can enable or disable a command, but not options WITHIN a command.)

Yes busybox calls its commands "applets" because Java was popular in 1998. I made the decision NOT to do that with toybox back in 2006. (Is a cleanup that isn't widely adopted really a cleanup, or a bespoke divergence from expetations? Eh, muddle on...)

Anyway, there are a bunch of simplifying design assumptions I could make, it's a question of how much compatibility I want with the kernel's kconfig. For example, blocks of related lines are indented, and I could REQUIRE that so instead of special casing mainmenu, source, comment, config, menu, choice, endmenu, and endchoice keywords (and whatever else upstream's grown that I'm not currently using but decide I want to support later), the parsing logic could just go "hey, unindented keyword right at the left edge: end the previous context block".

The sad part being that kconfig's "help" DOES care about indentation level, although it doesn't actually require the help text to be indented FARTHER than the help keyword (toys/pending/klogd.c has the help text block at the same level as the help keyword, meaning how does it tell when the block ends and thus a line starting with "default" or some such would NOT be a keyword)... It's SO CLOSE to having a reasonable design idea there, and then... doesn't. (Of course you can have empty lines in help text and the help continues, so it's never ENTIRELY straightforward. It's not "the next block of lines indented at least this far in", and of course you can mix tabs and spaces arbitrarily to achieve this "indentation level". Don't ask what happens if your first line is indented with 4 spaces and the second with 1 tab, how you trim the leading space there? Or what if you have one of those allowed blank lines as your first line of help text, does it defer counting the leading spaces or set it to zero? Dunno! Haven't checked yet!)

The kernel's kconfig wasn't really designed, it just sort of accumulated. I gave up on the kernel's version when it become turing complete in 2018, by adding the ability to call "rm -rf ~" to evaluate symbol dependencies. Yes really!. I am not implementing that, it is a BAD IDEA.

The kernel has module symbols, and visibility, and "select", and a whole bunch of stuff I'm just not using. Twenty years ago I'd have had ambitions of replacing the kernel's verion, but A) I've been juggling too many balls forever, B) I suspect Linux is more than halfway through its useful lifetime as a development project (rust and LLM code? Linus isn't even retired yet!), C) their kconfig is WAY down the Microsoft Word route of having giant expensive corner case features that matter deeply to like 3 users, and they've tied it to kbuild when it should JUST MAKE A ".config" FILE FROM Config.in FILES! It doesn't have a well-defined scope anymore. Dude.

MAYBE the new one could be useful to busybox and buildroot? Except busybox is a "mature" project that's not exactly moribund, but not looking to make major changes. And I've lost touch with buildroot development. (uClibc is long dead. I very vaguely recall yocto doing something disgusting here, but don't want to get that on me.)

Thunderbird has turned into a CPU-eating loop (as sometimes happens, it's a terribly coded legacy program), which I need to kill and restart to make it stop (and thus NOT halve my laptop's battery life). Except I have various open thunderbird windows scattered over my 8 desktops, partially composed replies and emails being used as a TODO post-it note and so on, and it would be a certain amount of work to clean that up.

So I "killall -STOP thunderbird", which is fine until I switch to that desktop and it renders as a big empty rectangle with whatever background info was in there before not being overdrawn, and this is queueing up an X11 event that's not getting serviced in a way that X11 is eventually going to be unhappy about (they don't exactly timeout, but they aren't discarded either) and I need to "killall -CONT thunderbird" and then stop it again to clear the event if I want to feel comfortable about my desktop stability.

Could be worse: firefox has some sort of horrible timer sending itself events, and if you -STOP that for any length of time (because it should not be eating CPU when it has nothing to do!) the entire desktop FREEZES for a while when you -CONT it and it does blocking processing of the accumulated backlog. Does this mean I could ignore thunderbird for 4 hours while it's stopped? No idea. I usually just kill firefox and tell it to reload tabs on restart. It's a pity vivaldi isn't in debian's repo. Yeah, I can add the external repo. And the one for signal. I just don't feel comfortable adding third party package repos, bypassing what little peer review the community provides. I stayed with chrome as long as I did because the original design of each tab being its own process meant I could kill cpu-eating tabs from the command line. And when that stopped working I could "pkill -f renderer" and still reload the individual tabs without losing track. I learned back on _netscape_ that when I bookmark something I never look at it again. I remember how in the OS/2 web browser I'd drag windows to the bottom right corner so just the tip was showing in my desktop and would accumulate dozens of them down there, tabbed browsing was a MUCH nicer way to accumulate a todo heap.

It's not just "finish reading this", it's "I have some project in mind" where this tab represents something I want to follow up on when I have sufficient brain. Where "sufficient brain" means "this is a heavy lift, I need to be fully rested and at my strongest with a large block of uninterrupted time to do this justice", so of course I clear out all the low hanging fruit but the heavy lifts accumulate, and when I DO sit down to tackle them I do one or two at a time barely making a dent in the backlog...

Went down to the big "down with this sort of thing then" protest at the state capital. (Which oddly enough is in St. Paul, not Minneapolis. It's a Dallas/Ft Worth sort of thing: other end of the green line.) I keep expecting for it to be obvious what to DO when I get there, but "you're already doing it" is the correct answer. Stood around for 2 hours not really being able to hear the speakers, got mildly sunburned, walked several stops along the green line towards home (13k steps for the day) and found out that "Sun Market" sells my checkerboard tea! (Cheaper than HEB had it!) There was exactly one taco truck at the protest, which was charging $2 for a soda (brought my own can) and $7 for a basket of fries (decided against). I suppose I admire their hustle. Found a lady making "hands off" buttons where you write what you want it to say before they button it, and I wrote "the penguins".

I wonder if there's a recording of the speakers online somewhere? Not really the point though. Some lady's protest song got removed from spotify, and judging by how she sang it there's no WAY it would have gotten as many listens if they HADN'T removed it. Spotify would totally have removed Bob Dylan but she was no bob dylan, although she pointed out up front that trying to play an acoustic guitar in minnesota cold took "in tune" off the table and the audience was appreciative. The current Bob Dylan, at least from a singing through the nose perspective, is probably Jesse Welles who pointed out that a CEO is an employee not an owner so Luigi could have aimed higher. (Despite all the hand wringing about said CEO they didn't even cancel the meeting he was going to, and replaced him with another from central casting within the week. It would be nice if there was a non-death way to effect political change, but the nameless faceless CEO's JOB was to deny medical care to people who would then die, in bulk, every day. Not a lot of sympathy in evidence in the public record so far. Merely guillotining the billionaires would have due process of law with forensic accountants producing an auditable public record. Guillotines are apparently the compromise position now. And asking for the death penalty is saying "he shouldn't have killed him, that's why we're going to kill him". Way to reclaim the moral high ground there.)

But the protest wasn't about that. It wasn't really about any one specific bad thing, due to the Gish Gallop nature of Project 2025. Lots of other speakers had their own "littany of awful". (Something about argentinians owning mines that poison wildlife?) And they had one of the people behind the target boycott, which I was unaware had been organized. (Sort of a tik-tok thing that caught on, because DUDE.)

I set out doing the medium-paranoia "phone in airplane mode, mask and headphones to very mildly annoy facial recognition, wear solid colors, leave the building from a different entrance than usual, do not leave fingerprints anywhere, bring a straw to drink with mask on" sort of thing, which the turnout rendered probably moot even before I got on the train.

The green line was WOEFULLY unprepared for a large progressive protest trying to reach a common venue via public transit. I got on near the start of the line (well, not long after it splits off from the blue line anyway) and every train that went by was FULL, wall-to-wall standing people. They'd already BEEN leaving people behind on previous stops. The train triver of the first one even made a cut-throat motion at the full platform of people carrying signs. I managed to squeeze on to a later train by applying tokyo rush hour standards (sort of jenga-ing myself flat against a door with both arms raised as it closed, then working my way towards an overlooked gap against a wall I could stand in). We then stopped at a dozen platforms full of people with signs, without being able to let anyone else on and nobody getting off.

I took pictures when I arrived but the crowd doubled in size after that as people trickled in, and I'm still reluctant to post anything that might show faces. I posted one that didn't show anyone's face. (No, my phone does not sync photos to "the cloud". I beat that crap out of it when I first got it and recheck every few months to undo Google's backsliding. It got its last security update in 2022, yet they're still sending code to halve the battery life and shame people for having bodies. Bad form.)

As several signs said, "even the introverts are here", and it was EXHAUSTING. Hit Aldi's but had to put everything back because they refused to take dollar coins (the green line gives dollar coins as change but the cashier said their nightly cash deposit thing can't handle them). Got home, slept a lot, woke up badly dehydrated and chugged a can of Arnold Rimmer, slept some more. That pretty much ate the day.

When I switched from gmail to dreamhost I didn't bother to set up new spam filtering, I just "read with the d key" when downloading. There's only about 500 spam emails a day, and back on gmaili I had to look at them all in the "spam" folder to fish out false positives ANYWAY so I might as well just do it myself in the first pass. It doesn't take long if you stay on top of it, and I can breeze through most of them deleting multiple messages per second when the subject is chinese characters, "rate enquiry", "shipping agents", "chinese phone parts", unexpected (fake) docusign, the whole gamut of "change your email password" through "new message notification" attempts to hijack the email account itself (I download and delete messages off the server each transaction so no, my mailbox is NOT almost full and if it was the email download in progress would be the fix for that. What _is_ ipfs dot io, anyway? An entire genre of scam links go there.) I only bother to read even the start of like 5% of the messages, meaning I can usually delete them faster than pop3 can download them.

Oddly enough, this blatant obviousness is intentional on the spammers' part because they're running elder abuse scams: they WANT to select for senile idiots who are easily duped. They don't want to waste their time on the phone with somebody who might have second throughts. (Or any thoughts.) They want a good mark, gullible money that's dumb enough to respond to a proposal people with working brains would not entertain. (Sadly, after all the surgery and blood pressure lowering medication, Stu had deteriorated into that category by the time Fuzzy moved out. His bank account was constantly drained dry by things he kept signing up for on his phone, and his brother Mitch (who was not _that_ much better, cognitively speaking) wouldn't let Fuzzy help because HE needed to be the one in control. There's a reason she's back in New York now.)

Which is why it's interesting that the "you won a lottery you didn't enter!" genre, where someone wants to give you a giant pile of unsolicited money, has switched from claiming it's somebody like Mackenzie Bezos or Warren Buffett or "The World Bank" giving away money ("State lottery" without naming a state, etc), to crediting "President Donald J. Trump" for the random largess. Last month they were crediting Musk and Doge for wanting to hand out six figure checks to random email addresses, but even the senile vegetables have gotten over _that_ one.

If you're still a loyal maggot today, they have a bridge to sell you. Because you've self-identified as someone who will spend $99 for AI-generated NFTs.

(There's a reason "The Boomers will die" is my calming mantra. 50 years breathing tetraethyl lead, stacked with senility, stacked with a lifetime of self-referential navel-gazing entitlement as the main characters of every story which the universe revolved around. The fever breaking doesn't mean the patient is healthy again, but it's a necessary prerequisite. They've provided the criticial mass of cannon fodder since they first started going senile back in the "tea party, nigerian prince" days. "Never trust anyone over 30" was THEIR motto, back when their brains still worked.)

I thought I'd escaped the usual "catching something" from the international flight (11 hours in a pressurized can with hundreds of other people breathing recycled air, kind of inevitable), but no it just had a bit of an incubation period. This one's a cough. All the coughing.

I got my quarterly poke from the money concierge asking if there's anything I want to do with my retirement account. Not specifically because Dementia Man is about to implode the economy so billionaires can scoop up every asset everywhere at fire sale rates, but just because it's a new quarter so courtesy call.

I haven't replied because I don't know what to say. I worked hard to get it all into an S&P 500 index fund, and would have been better off putting it in the 5% savings account. Or a sock drawer. Oh well, "the best laid plans of mice and men are generally equal". Going by how the previous great depression turned out, I'm 99% sure it's got a whole lot more "down" to go and a very long time to spend there (the 1% is "octogenarian has sudden stroke and his cult does not survive their god's demise"), but selling the dip instead of riding it out is timing the market and I'm not good at that. If anything is left of social security I won't be able to claim it for 20 years, and he should be (long?) dead by then. Whether the US dollar will still exist is an open question...

I don't LIKE caring about money. I want to have just enough money to not have to care about money, which according to Daniel Pink is actually the common case of economic motivations. Alas, the rich can't exist without the poor or there's nothing to spend the money ON (Bill Gates does not hire Warren Buffet to wash his car, "you can't get good help these days"), so billionaires have carefully engineered "the precariat", and the bottom 99% have so far inexplicably failed to notice that each billionaire has a neck and applied the obvious historical solutions yet. No, Luigi doesn't count: a CEO is an employee not an owner, he could have aimed higher. Capitalism is a religion that makes kings using numbers and bankers instead of sin and knights. As with all religions, it only works when a critical mass of people buy into it and the believers actively ostracize those who don't. People with food and shelter can opt out of the rat race, so guess what all the inflation's focused on as the billionaires tighten their grip? Eggs were the cheap protein. It's strategic and focused.

Google doubled Jeff's cloud bill by making the AI stuff no longer opt out, so now not only are they leaking our proprietary data to third parties (Hey Google: what is coresemi working on that they haven't publicized yet) but charging us double for the privilege. So we looked at "NextCloud" plugins that let us do the "two editors, one cup document" remote collaboration thing, and we need to set up our own imap server, we need to set up a stable rackmounted machine with a static IP (we're prototyping it on something with a DHCP IP), and downloading all our old data OUT of google's cloud is the real headache. (We can do it manually one file at a time, as an "export" with multiple data type options that work differently... for example opendocument loses alpha-channel in background graphics but exporting as powerpoint doesn't. No big "give us a tarball of all our data" option, nor any way to get one big list we can go down and tick things off. So it's eating engineer time to avoid being charged more than a tokyo engineer makes.)

We've got a month to get everyting out before the next bill comes due.

Spent several days basically curled up into a ball when I got back. Trying to get some work done now.

So bash -c $'BANANA="ls -l"\nalias banana=\'$BANANA\'\nbanana' says "line 3: banana: command not found" but when I type the three lines at an interactive command prompt I get a directory listing. I am reaching the point where matching bash's behavior exactly is starting to seem like a bad idea.

I keep poking at "alias" support hoping it makes sense, and coming to some disturbing conclusions that I do NOT want to implement. (Did... did he put alias support in the interactive command editing layer? That CAN'T be right.)

Fade's father is visiting. He's a devout christian (worked for a church his entire career, remember how Fade's parents raised her in a mission in Ecuador?), and I'm finding it VERY HARD not to needle him about The Recidivist.

I've actually studied a lot of bible stuff, read the entire Torah (The old testament: director's cut) in my comparitive religions class at community college, follow Bart Ehrman's podcast, read "Ken's Guide to the Bible" when it first came out, etc. But studying Norse mythology isn't the same as believing in Thor, and Fade got a doctorate in classics without worshipping Athena. It's more "I could sing The Vatican Rag from memory when I was 7" and following "so where DID the names of Santa's Reindeer come from" until I'm telling people about Haddon Sundblom's coca-cola commercials and watching rankin-bass stop motion making-of specials and trying to explain why the guy who voiced "Tony the Tiger" didn't get credited for singing "You're a mean one Mr. Grinch"... Just because I wouldn't be surprised if a dude named Nicholas actually did live in Turkey 1700-ish years back (and possibly even donated a dowry to three daughters whose father was otherwise forcing them into prostitution) doesn't mean a talking snowman and flying raindeer living at the north pole (who weren't findable when people actually went there) inexorably follows from that. "But if you don't belive you won't get any presents" isn't an argument. Reality does not care what you believe, that's what makes it reality.

Personally knowing someone who organizes their life around The Ten Commandments is like meeting someone who devoutly follows the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. I mean... yeah, that's a thing you can do. You realize that none of the first 4 commandments in the king james bible have anything to do with morality, right? No other gods, no graven images, keep the sabbath holy, don't take the lord's name in vain: none of that is morality, it's all just monotheism clearing its turf. And then "honour thy deadbeat dad despite whatever alcoholic beatings or groping may have been involved" is once again pretty iffy. It doesn't get to "thou shall not kill" until number SIX. Don't steal is eight. In between is "adultery" (so nobody should ever get married, to avoid violating an archaic ceremony), and bearing false witness against thy neighbor... why the qualifier? It's ok to lie to people who live far enough away? Or siblings? And not coveting thy neighbor's manservant gets us into the whole "slavery" thing. The word "manservant" is a euphemism: the bible in greek is FULL of slavery, just like the ancient greek world was. How is the timeless word of an omnipotent omniscient being "a product of its time" again? Egypt has over 5000 years of _recorded_ history and your magic book chronicles events from 2000 years ago, why wait over a hundred generations of civilization to go "oh right, time to start saving people!" (Saving them from... you? All this "original sin" stuff, inherited badness exactly like India's caste system.) Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent: pick two. And why is your god _hiding_? "God told you" but can't tell me? What does he need YOU for exactly, when he's omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent? To "spread the word"? Why? Your book has angels showing up all over the place to perform miracles, they didn't USED to be hiding, but only back in mythological "a friend of a friend told me" times. Today the world's covered with cameras and not a single miracle gets recorded. Funny that. (Mysterious ways is not an excuse, it's you seeing faces in clouds.)

Even if you retrench to "well the garden of Eden and Noah's arc and such didn't REALLY happen, but these parables are a better source of morality than aesop's fables"... No they're not. Seriously, this book is not a source of morality. Four words that could have saved millions of lives: "boil your drinking water", are found nowhere amongst the pages and pages of "bats aren't kosher, but this one species of locust explicitly is for some reason". If you're ignoring the parts about mixing fabrics then you're _already_ acknowleding a source of morality OTHER than the book that supercedes what the book literally says. Deuteronomy 17:5 says anyone worshiping other gods (or the sun, or the moon) should be stoned to death. Leviticus 24:16 says "anyone who blasphemes the name of the LORD is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death." Not a lot of grey area there. The stoning scene in life of brian is LITERALLY what the bible tells people to do. The fact we don't is because we all admit the bible is wrong, and cherry pick a subset of what it says based on our own moral judgement.

Of course there's the "God changed his mind, replacing the old eternal infallible law with a new and different eternal infallible law" argument. As demonstrated by Jesus' speech in Matthew 10:34-36 "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household." The dude who smote the fig tree and in Matthew 15 told a "woman of Canaan" asking for help that he only helped israelites until she compared herself to a dog to get past his racism. Is the real reason all the old testament laws stopped being the timeless and infallible word of god because god changed his mind and his eternal laws stopped being laws? Or did people just pick and choose what they wanted to follow? The NEW stuff has Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple is in all four gospels yet the evangelicals have "prosperity gospels" and televangelists are big business. Render unto caesar that which is caesar's and they stan billionaires who pay zero taxes. Yeah yeah, "the devil can quote scripture" I.E. the words in your book are utterly useless for determining right from wrong, and you _explicitly_ acknowledge that. The words are just tools, what REALLY matters is who is saying them. The televangelists begging for money are the right sort of people, as is the "grab 'em by the pussy" guy.

The fact the guy the new testament's about got tortured to death and his followers huffed the largest batch of copium in history about it with the ultimate "no, he MEANT to do that, it was all part of the great plan" is just... So God can just forgive sin, but in this case he couldn't, not without coming down to earth and having himself ritually humiliated and tortured to death over a period of multiple days. This is your religion's CENTRAL THESIS. If he'd been killed by the electric chair you'd all be wearing little electric chairs around your neck. And this makes SENSE to you.

But the weird belief thing by itself is on the level of "Huh, you're a monarchist. You think King Charles is somehow a special sort of person. In 2024. Still. Really." and I wouldn't really mind what makes him happy if it was just like a fanatical sports team fandom or he'd spent decades following the Grateful Dead around the country to see every show. But christianity is a wholly owned subsidiary of the republican party these days, which aggressively legislates their beliefs, and THAT I have a problem with. These people literally worship trump.

Anyway, Fade's father is visiting, who was openly thrilled about the anti-abortion stuff trump did last time (after every single one of his supreme court appointees perjured themselves in their confirmation hearings), and I am being as diplomatic as I can manage.

Onna plane back to Minneapolis. I look forward to seeing Fade again, not so much being back among the magats.

Plane is packed, middle seat, no chance to program.

International dateline, I got 48 hours of the 27th. Wheee. (So much jetlag.)

Bash is just sad at times.

$ alias banana='$BANANA'; BANANA='ls -l'; banana
bash: banana: command not found
$ banana
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 4 landley landley 4096 Mar 22 00:33 bms-c
$

The answer to "what order does alias perform operations in" is basically Munsch's "the scream".

I've been deterred from just creating a new gitlab account because when I go to the issue link the top bar has "log in" and "free trial" buttons: all accounts are either paid for or time out. It is NOT a free web hosting service with any interest in open source projects, it is proudly a paid proprietary web hosting service only.

I remember when I was researching github alternatives (back when they were taking my web login away) I looked at gitlab as one of the options and rejected it, but the options I _didn't_ choose all bleed together. I mostly remember gitlab as "that place you pull qemu from these days" and there were some other historical projects that migrated to it when other servers went down, I think? They're not sourceforge, not kernel.org, not gnu/savannah... remember when "google code" was relevant? Those were the days...

Alas if I _do_ have a historical gitlab account grandfathered in before this venture late stage capitalism nonsense, I don't seem to have my notes about it on the machine I brought with me to tokyo. Sigh, last visit the looming personal server administration issues were migrating my email from gmail to dreamhost, and figure out what to do about losing my github web login. Always something...

Felt largely ok, went out, ate lunch with people (very slowly), crashed HARD, had to go home. Whee.

(It's like my blood pressure is really low, and digestion lowering it further means I just collapse.)

Sigh, nobody's upvoted the gitlab issue. Multiple people have now reported it to me, and even retweeted my mastodon posts about it, but despite posting it to the toybox list nobody's engaged with gitlab.

I may have to make a new gitlab account (whether I already have one or not). Also, if their "virus" detection is literally "a document containing the string landley.net" (which it seems to be), there's a number of wikipedia pages linking to my site (especially to the computer history mirror), and links from lwn.net and so on, that you'd think would trigger. Mastodon's syndicated several URLs with that string in it. A bunch of linux kernel archive sites...

But I'm not trying to engage with this while still loopy from saturday's gastric attack.

Spent the day in bed. Running a fever, for some reason. Starting to suspect this was an allergic reaction or something rather than food poisoning.

Food poisoning is never fun, but japan's "bathroom and shower are in separate rooms, and even small solid chunks can't go down the shower drain" adds an extra layer of fun to the proceedings. On the bright side, I did not aspirate anything! Which is pretty much what I was focused on. For 8 hours.

(I think the turning point was being able to keep water down around sunrise. It was an unpleasant night.)

It's good to know that renewables have passed coal in the US so despite the Recidivist's thrashing, market forces are strongly arrayed against fossil fuels. And the actuarial tables against fossil politicians. (Not that both won't cheat on all cylinders, the question is who provides groveling compliance and who at least slow walks it until the octagenarian's dead.)

Someone was kind enough to open a gitlab issue. It's most likely the same nonsense I argued with dreamhost about a few months back. If I have a gitlab account the login info isn't on the machine I have with me in tokyo, so hopefully other people can upvote the issue...

(I remember looking around for places to flee github to when they took away my web login, and gitlab somehow managed to be MORE corporate than microsoft.)

Got an email that ublock is blocking landley.net. I do not have the spoons to deal with this right now.

I got a couple of bug reports about selinux support in tar, which collectively imply that Elliott never tested archive creation, only extraction. I do not have a machine with selinux in it, I ran fedora in a VM to test this stuff way back when.

Anyway, I think they're both fixed now, but I pestered the reporter to give me a pair of test files (which are actually .tar files despite the .zip extension, because Microsoft Github allows you to upload files with a .tar extension but will not allow you to upload files with a .zip extension, no the actual format or contents of the files don't matter, thanks Microsoft Github).

The file produced by red hat and the file produced by toybox have some differences, but after looking through them (diff -u <(hd gnu.tar) <(hd toybox.tar) | less) I'm sort of leaning towards NOT regression testing xattr creation, because A) I still don't personally care about this feature I don't use, B) ew.

The first change is that that the header's filename (which is basically a comment) says "./PaxHeaders/a" and "./PaxHeaders/b" for the two entries in the gnu one, and "././@PaxHeaders" for both in toybox. It seems to be accepting it anyway, because the important thing is that the header is type 'x', not the name. An x record applies to the next header entry after this one, so the name in the x record isn't used and doesn't matter. My code is creating those comment-like names via sprintf(tmp.name, "././@%s", type=='x' ? "PaxHeaders" : "LongLink"); which goes into a fixed length buffer padded with NUL bytes so the shorter name doesn't actually save any space. I got that from somewhere, and it looks like gnu maybe has version skew? Making the output binary identical is silly when what they produce changes each version upgrade.

The next change is that various internal header length counters are different, because the payload is different. Seems like an effect, not a cause.

The next hunk of diff is that gnu's header has "ustar\000\0" (I.E. ustar, a null byte, two ascii zeroes, and a null byte), and mine has "ustar " (with two trailing spaces) and "root" with null terminators. My ustar has two trailing spaces of padding (to match what was there at the time!) and I'm using the name instead of the UID by default. Which is WHAT IT WAS DOING, and while there's a --numeric-owner flag to tell it to use numbers, there isn't any sort of --non-numeric-owner flag to tell it to use names: it's the default behavior. If it STOPS being the default behavior, we lose that capability. So either gnu broke and lost a capability, or Red Hat is being nuts with aliases or something? Plus, the fields are at fixed offsets, so their 00 starting two bytes earlier than it should is funky (and why TWO zeroes?), their actual "uname" field seems to be entirely NULL. And then they populated the gname field, which it looks like mine didn't (dunno why, but it's an x record so who cares: none of this gets used?) The actual "I can't parse their output, they can't parse my output" bug reports got fixed, this is differences that haven't resulted in actual problems... Concerning, but I dunno what's going on here.

And then the next difference is that an x record is basically a string with a bunch of "%d keyword=value\n" records concatenated together, where the %d is length in bytes of the record... Except of course it's not the length of the string, it's the length of the LINE including the newline, the number itself, and the space between the number and the string. (Sigh. You have to print it, work out how many digits that number is, and then work out if adding that increases the length of the number by one ala 9->10 and this is VERY GNU. They did not have to do this. It's entirely self-inflicted.)

$ alias ls='ls -l'
$ ls
sh: ls -l: No such file or directory

I was TRYING to confirm that alias isn't recursive, but... Sigh.

Busy in Tokyo with other things (Jeff's stuff), haven't been using my laptop and thus haven't been blogging. Tokyo remains very nice. Being on the other side of the planet from Putin's pet tangerine is also very nice.

Trying to glue the cleaned up blake3 implementation into toybox, which would be easy to do if there weren't two codepaths. The library codepath has magic string names for each hash type corresponding with some enum out of a header, but openssl doesn't seem to have blake3 yet? I cd'd over to the boringssl source, listed the top level contents, noticed a "rust" directory, and noped right out of there.

If the rust devs want to write new implementations, fine. The go, swift, zig, and oberon people are not trying to contaminate every existing project with internal language domain crossings too mark their territory. Nor do they insist that they are "owed" all those other projects. If you want to create a replacement for the linux kernel, do that. If you want to implement a new drop-in libssl replacement in a different language, do that. But DON'T BREAK THE EXISTING ONE YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES. But no, the current existing codebase must BECOME riddled with rust, not be replaced by it and outcompeted in the marketplace of ideas. And of course it doesn't remove C (because they can't, they're not actually load bearing), it just adds more layers of complexity.

Do a new implementation in a new language if you want, but STOP CONTAMINATING C PROJECTS. One project written in two languages with binary domain transitions at runtime is a BAD THING. Lua is designed to be extended with C, rust is a parasite that infects C.

This is why I refuse to have a rust toolchain in any of the systems I build. Any package that can't build without specks of rust weakening its infrastructure is broken, and I stay at the last version until I find a dropbear or bearssl or similar package that ISN'T CRAZY.

I have plenty of practice avoiding systemd, and abandoning KDE when it got toxic, and avoiding windows and facebook in the first place. "Not being part of that ecosystem" is fine with me. I am willing to be convinced, but not coerced.

(It's really still the same day, but international dateline.)

I'm trying to debug the "wget http://10.0.2.2/blah.tgz | tar xv" bug, which is like 3 different bugs. I should have this codepath in the test suite, but autodetecting compression types from nonseekable input isn't something the host version does, so it would be a toyonly test anyway. (It works fine if I pipe to tar xvz, but it TRIES to autodetect...)

Got another request for "nologin". Still don't see the point, but it's in debian's default install and in busybox, so...

The plane's completely full (I know because the checkin kiosk did this "bid to be bumped" pop-up thing, $500 was the max of the anchoring options and they didn't bite when I hit it), but I have an aisle seat so managed to do a little work on my laptop. (I have elbow room on one side, anyway.)

But it's in bursts, and after fixing a thing and queueing up three more things I need to do (in a "before I can fix THAT bug I hit THIS bug, oh yeah I remember that issue I haven't fixed yet..." way), I took a break to try to watch one of the in-flight movies on the seatback screen.

I had high hopes for "Deadpool and Wolverine", but no. I had to pause at 12 minutes in. And then again about once a minute since. Through him being rejected by the avengers, through failing as a used car salesman, through the painful burthday party here he's broken up with Vanessa for some reason? Even through the TVA which is where you'd THINK the movie would perk up but it's still just sort of... It's not quite embarassment squick, but it's emotionally hard to watch in a way I don't remember previous deadpool movies being. They were cathartic and funny. There was tragedy and drama but it not a lot of "waiting for the other shoe to drop" for more than like 30 seconds at a time.

Maybe it's just been a long time and I'm not remembering. Maybe I got spoiled by too many clips online. But it's paused at just under 23 minutes in and other than the credits sequence (which was great), this movie has been clearing its throat and waiting to start.

The concept of "anchor being" is... sigh. A billion galaxies all depending on one dude they've never met? The fabric of reality breaking down because Jesus died? I'm not buying the physics. They could have at least come up with some more convincing horseshit about "it's an echo of Thanos doing that snap, one guy killing half his universe resonated across parallel realities that are currently either living or dying based on the fate of an individual because snap." Give me a fscking FIG LEAF here. (How did this universe survive long enough for the TVA to be founded?) Yes I expect fourth wall breaks (which in-universe are treated as Wade being mental because head full of tumors, but here they're... not?), but I've been completely pulled out of this movie a half dozen times and we're not CLOSE to half an hour in. "I am aware of voyeuristic extradimensional entities who mimic my reality for their entertainment" is not the same as "I'm going to grab the microphone and pull it into frame because this is not real even to its own characters". I can't make the airplane playback go 2x to speed through it more tolerably. I'm glad I didn't see this in theatres because I might have walked out.

Darn it, I was hoping to like this one. (Unlike Moana 2 which I'm just not bothering with. At least Aladdin II was forwards looking not backwards looking. That was trying to be the PILOT for a TV series, rather than "we cancelled the TV series and frankensteined the corpses of a dozen episodes into a single theatrical release. This time the "sucky direct to video plot" is recycled leftovers made from something that already explicitly failied and will not be happening. They're showing it to us because they already paid for it, not because they LIKED it. They explicitly DIDN'T like it enough to finish the series, but hey, sit through it in theatres! Kids are too dumb to know better! That's... Ouch. No. Do not sully the memory of the original like that. Yes I have the option to watch that on this plane. Or "Mufasa" which FUCK no, a PREQUEL to the LIVE ACTION REMAKE??? Which WASN'T LIVE ACTION BECAUSE CGI ANIMALS WITH NO EXPRESSIONS OR BODY LANGUAGE AND... AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!)

Ooh goddess, Paradox's villain rant at 25 minutes is... Couldn't they at least get whatsisname, the Butler from Clue and Sweet Transsexual From Transylvania to do it? He went full muppet in Muppet Treasure Island, he could pull this off. The random empty suit they have here is failing to ham it up OR be convincing. It's neither serious nor camp, it's just sad.

At 26 minutes it's trying to provide motivation, and just isn't. He literally established that "everyone I care about is in this room" around 10 minutes ago, but they won't transplant the contents of THAT ROOM. Why? No reason! Ryan Reynolds actually emoted a little bit (maybe 10 seconds), but the guy in the suit is just nothing. He's neither Darth Vader nor a punchclock villain, his motivation is READING A SCRIPT.

Possily "kill your family to join post-endgame marvel alongside Quantumania and The Eternals" is not a coherent pitch for a villain to even make. It keeps showing clips of The Avengers from 2012, but they already did Endgame, that's over. And Deadpool already asked to join The Avengers like 5 minutes ago, this is supposed to take place AFTER that. The first movie did nonlinear storyteling, but you could piece it back together pretty easy. Deadpool 1 asked "why did this happen" and then backed up to show you. Why does he want to join The Avengers here instead of the X-Men? Yeah yeah meta Disney but it makes no sense IN UNIVERSE. The emotional stakes are BACKWARDS, Disney thinks it's hot shit and that the audience cares more about behind-the-scenes making-of drama than the story ON THE SCREEN. This movie is failing to tell a coherent story.

I remember how, to me at least, far and away the weakest part of the Dr. Who 50th anniversary special was the meeting with The Curator. Because it was all nods and winks that made no sense in-universe. If they'd established "this was one of the leisure hive clones of the 4th Doctor who survived that episode and will eventually decay into The Watcher and merge back into The Doctor when the 4th doctor regenerates between Logopolis and Castrovalva (as we saw on screen, thus ANSWERING a question instead of asking one), and in the meantime the clone gets a couple hundred years of scurrying around behind the scenes pulling strings to balance the fallout from the Logopolis entropy wave destablilizing the universe, which was why the Key to Time had to be assembled to save most of the universe from that particular disaster, and as long as he was cleaning THAT up he took a quick swipe at the time war on his way out... they could easily have made a fantastic story out of that. Tom Baker's elderly character getting increasingly pale and frail as his time runs out, adding "the watcher" makeup and racing against the clock to finish his tasks until the current Doctor drops him off near where Tegan's Aunt Vanessa's car broke down at the end. But "all these nods and winks mean NOTHING in-universe" was self-indulgent nonsense that I found painful to watch. It served no story purpose. The story needs to emerge from the motivations of the characters. If that's not what's driving the plot then there are no emotional stakes and I have no investment in what's going on.

Seriously, this is freshman level writing 101.

And half the point of the Loki series was apparently that the "sacred timeline" read like a cult to everybody outside the TVA, so now there are other timelines the TVA allows to exist (they no longer prune everything)... but one of them is still scared? How does that work? I'm sorry, what did the Loki series accomplish exactly? "We no longer prune" THEN THERE ISN'T ONE SACRED TIMELINE. Especially since going forward past Endgame even Disney's audience doesn't know what "the" timeline is, it's branching all over the place. That whole Doctor Strange and The Olson Twins' Mommy movie, Spiderman Across The Universe's Live Action Remake with Toby and Andrew, and didn't that forgettable "Ms. Marvel having a three-way" movie involve Monica Rambeau winding up exiled to X-Cheers where Blue Beastle is played by Frasier? (I remember Monica's name because I used to read the comics, I remember her getting her silver costume from a mardi gras rack: Binary was off with the Starjammers and Inflation Fetish Lass wasn't a thing yet.) Which of all those timelines is the "sacred" one, exactly? Didn't most of them fork off a common base, and then interact with lots of OTHER timelines? "We visited this other timeline, came back to ours, you pruned the other one so it never existed but we were there for quite a while breathing its air and interacting with people so why are we still here now if part of our personal past no longer exists..."

They're not being consistent even _within_ the Tennesee Valley Authority. The timeline was sacred because that actor they hyped up to replace T'Challa (who then got fired for domestic violence) pruned all but one timeline, because he invented a flawed time machine that forked the universe to death and was going to smear everything into a lifeless fog otherwise, or some such? And then there were two seasons of plot where Loki won the Game of Thrones so yggdrasil could grow out of his ass and now there can be lots of timelines going in parallel without spaghettification... but one of them is still sacred? (I didn't see the series, I don't have Google+ and I'm not planning to buy Google Glass to watch it, but I saw a bunch of clips on youtube because Loki's actor remains engaging and Tall Round is adorable as OB. I should not have to be up to speed on the minutia of TV series to follow THEATRICAL offerings, but from what little I know everying this movie is saying is nonsense even WITHIN the context of what they'd already established about the TVA.)

And hang on, the movie showed Ryan travelilng to Earth 616 to talk to Happy Hogan about joining the 2018 Avengers (long before the TVA showed up, outside of the opening credits which was a flash-foward). It SAID "Earth 616". How did he cross timelines to do that? Cable's time machine was "forward and backwards" not sideways. (The TVA guy said Deadpool made a mess of HIS timeline. The single timeline Deadpool is from, number ten thousand something. Cable's thingy was not interdimensional travel. As with the Tardis, it can't navigate SIDEWAYS. There's no coordinate settings for other universes, it doesn't inherently know how to go that way, it only accidentally ever winds up in pre-existing alternate univeses like Inferno or E-space or the new Cybermen's universe due to external factors dragging it off course, and you then have to VERY CAREFULY BACK OUT through the hole you came in to get home.) And wouldn't going to work for The Avengers in another universe have involved leaving his family behind to do it? Since that wasn't his universe? I'M CONFUSED.

28:30: did they ever establish that transplanting a Logan would work? If so, why couldn't the TVA just do that? (I WANT TO LIKE THIS MOVIE. PLEASE STOP FAILING AT STORYTELLING! I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE IMMERSION while confined to an uncomfortable chair for twelve and a half hours.)

Sigh. It picked up a bit once Huge Ackman got a chance to act, but I made it a little past the 50 minute mark and just stopped. The evil bald lady from Star Trek The Motionless Picture starting a cult is just not my problem. I do not care. I cannot BRING myself to care. Not after Human Torch America broke his neck falling, but was then resurrected so she could kill him again, because she's so dumb Deadpool could trivially manipulate her into killing a random stranger he just met who had tried to be kind to them. For no in-universe reason. What do any of these people EAT? How are they protected from this giant all-devouring smoke monster from "Lost" when they have a large visible base in a fixed location on the surface? Deadpool viscerally murdered like a hundred TVA agents, and then comes back to have a civil conversation with their boss. Instead of killing him (which you'd think a disintegrator stick that looks like that COULD DO) they put him a prison that Loki ALREADY ESCAPED FROM back in that TV series that explicitly took place before this movie. They still put people in there, with a giant death monster that CAN kill them, but won't RELIABLY do so, and otherwise leave them unguarded. Why?

This is just random unconnected things happening on screen, I'm out.

Preparing for my flight to Tokyo tomorrow morning: full backup of my laptop less than a week ago is probably good enough. I did a git fetch on repositories I might want to poke at on the flight, and linux-kernel had stuff but busybox hasn't been updated since February 9th and musl since February 12th. I've been feeling really guilty about not going faster on toybox, but DUDE...

As with last trip, I'm stress cooking. Trying to leave Fade with All The Food Boxes for work lunches and dinners while I'm away.

I had to go to Target to get more jeans. I feel guilty about spending any money there until their DEI cowardice/appeasement gets undone (or never if it doesn't, still not on Faceboot, still not using Windows), but at the moment I can't think of a better place to buy clothing in Minneapolis. (Well I dunno what's around.) I bought everything else I usually get at Target at Cub instead, which is more expensive and has worse selection, but is not the subject of an active boycott I'm aware of. (They may be terrible, but if so they were QUIETLY terrible. They did not publicly preemptively appease a would-be dictator as a show of performative fealty.)

The FSF remains surprisingly incompetent:

$ tar xvf gdb-6.12.xz
$ cd gdb-6.12
$ tar xvf ../gmp-6.2.1.tar.xz
$ mv gmp-* gmp
$ tar xvf ../mpfr-4.2.0.tar.xz
$ mv mpfr-* mpfr
$ ./configure --target=sh2eb-elf
$ make
...
target-float.c:1160:10: fatal error: mpfr.h: No such file or directory
1160 | #include <mpfr.h>

It's RIGHT THERE. Configure passed, you built 8 gazillion subdirectories, and then suddenly you can't find YOUR OWN COMPONENT THAT'S IN THE TREE. ("Autoconf is useless" is still to the tune of "every sperm is sacred".)

$ make clean; make | wc -l

2565

It made it 2500 lines into the build before going "boing", most of those one file being compiled per line. Sigh... (I'm ONE GUY and I try to test all the mkroot targets before each release. They can't test all their build targets. Oh well...)

I have been pointed at a small simple public domain blake3 implementation, which seems a good thing to glue into toybox.

It means I'm skipping blake2. And there's no agreed-upon /etc/shadow "$1$salt$hash" indicator for either hash. (In part because there's no standards authority for that!)

Ah, wait. "man 5 crypt". $6$ is sha512, $5$ is sha256, $sha1$ is sha1. Nothing for blake2 or blake3 (was there a blake1?), or sha3. I tried to look at "yescrypt" but it's an intentionally obfuscated magic implementation that SMELLS like a scam. I suppose I could ask Michael Kerrisk? (I know he handed the man pages project off, but the new guy DOES NOT HAVE A WEBSITE.)

I want to replace TOYBOX_LIBCRYPTO and TOYBOX_LIBZ (and WGET_LIBTLS) with a single global switch that says always use internal implementations even when there's an external library with a potentially faster version of stuff. Then the default behavior (when the config symbol is disabled) would be to __has_include() the relevant header and use it if it's there, but use the internal one (or disable the functionality) if it's not. It can check for LIBCRYPTO and fall bback to checking for LIBTLS (because if both are installed it would pull hash functions from libcrypto already so might as well use it for everything).

The problem is, what to call the new switch. TOYBOX_NOLIBS? TOYBOX_INTERNAL? Hmmm... Until I implement my own https "internal" isn't right bcause the switch would disable https support. NOLIBS isn't the est name, but it's sort of what's going on here? TOYBOX_NO_EXTERNAL? TOYBOX_NODEPS?

Woo, I edited past the blockage and may actually have 2024 up and be on to a 2025 public blog file soon! (Before the end of February even!)

[Spoilers: nope.] [Futher spoilers: I'm editing this on April 8th. There was more politics and ball-curling before the anger/spite caught up.]

I often make bullet point todo lists while working, it's a good way to organize my thoughts, but they tend to look like this which is not the same as a blog entry. And I usually edit such lists a bunch of times as I go along. And there's the temptation to do a bullet point list in a blog entry, and sometimes that becomes my active "keep track of current work" list because it's the one that's up to date, and I should really know better by now because it never ends well. Editing should be "is this coherent, does it render well, did I finish my thoughts, look up the URLs I meant to link to". Simple, quick to do stuff. Not "completely rewrite this for hours to explain what it means".

The second bug making mkroot/testroot.sh hang doing "toybox timeout -i 10 bash -c ./run-qemu.sh -drive format=raw,file='$TEST'/init.$BASHPID < /dev/null 2>&1" was that for recursive command calls, toy_exec() wasn't clearing the old command's signal handlers, so potentially calling an inappropriate function and segfaulting if it received a signal after the fork. This one was ANNOYING to track down, so many printf()s to dredge through to the failure point. Also, it had 4 interacting processes (timeout forked toysh which backgrounded a shell script using the ampersand, and that shell script called toybox's dirname command. In a defconfig build all four of those were toybox processes forked from the parent toybox process, and ASAN positively lost its MARBLES at that. Me, I just started each printf() with the current pid number, ala dprintf(2, "%d message", getpid()); so I could keep the output straight. Seriously, you can debug just about anything with printf()s.

The November 28 blog entry is being really annoying to edit and post, because I did my normal todo bullet point notes-to-self as just a blog entry while working on the shell function call stack redesign, and it does NOT translate to HTML easily. And alas Google Chrome has been absolutely terrible about <pre> tags forever, because if you don't explicitly set the font size the default font size for the monospaced font ISN'T the size of the previous font, it's 1. I.E. the smallest possible size of tiny unreadable font, yes it's an obvious bug, no they haven't fixed it in... 6 years I think? Because every page should have a stylesheet and if it doesn't that's just silly, even though stylesheets regularly make stuff worse. I note that <pre> tags without gratuitous micromanagement render just fine on firefox, and I made puppy eyes at the Vivaldi guys first time I tried using that.

Look: I don't know if you prefer a white or black background for your text, why would I be making these decisions for you? Here is some test, with paragraph breaks, links to other pages, and the occasional bold and bulletpoint list. If your browser can't render that, it is a CRAPPY BROWSER that's less capable than Mosaic was 30 years ago back BEFORE netscape hired its developers away with silicon valley VC money. (VC money: turning open source internet infrastructure into exploitative gatekeeping spyware since William Shockley moved all the way accross the country from Bell Labs because he was such an asshole nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. Capitalism is a bad thing.)

The tiny desk thing remains better than nothing. If nothing else, it prevents the laptop from overheating when it's directly on a blanket. It's ungainly and trying to get up from under it I have already spilled a lemonade (clipped it with a wooden leg) and caused a surprising amount of laundry. Still, soldiering on...

Suspend and resume fixed two finger scrolling in xfce. I have no idea what's going on what that. (After a suspend and resume it attached the touchpad hardware to a different driver? What, race condition or uninitialized variable or something in the driver? Who knows. If linux-kernel wasn't so intensely self-fellating these days I might try to track it down, but...)

I was curious if Tim Bird'sboot log scraper would run on mkroot (I.E. under toysh: spoiler yeah but the UI is apocolyptically bad and does a complaint-reboot cycle adding command line options and kernel boot arguments multiple times until eventually mollified, at which point I had a large text file I wasn't entirely clear about what to do with).

To get images to run this script on (and confirm that toysh _can_ run the script, and maye use it as a test load to fix any missing features it needed), I did a mkroot build all (mkroot/mkroot.sh CROSS=allnonstop LINUX=~/linux/linux) in a newly cloned toybox directory, which was also a chance to regression test the current linux-git against my ongoing patch stack. Everything built fine but of course mkroot/testroot.sh initially failed for all targets because I hadn't switched the "timeout bash -c blah" to "timeout /bin/bash -c blah" because toysh has a bash alias so it recursed into toysh, which fails to run the relevant command line for some reason. I should track that down and fix it.

The first bug is that once upon a very long time ago, getval() (or whichever equivalent I was using early in toysh's development) returned the whole name=value string, and the current behavior just returns the value, so adding 6 to skip SHLVL= is wrong because the function I called to fetch the data already did that for me. (This only happens in the fork/exec path, and I've mostly been testing the nommu subshell path, so I hadn't spotted it.)

But there's a second bug, and ASAN totally craps the bed on it: $ ASAN=1 make clean toybox && ./toybox timeout -i 10 bash -c "root/i686/run-qemu.sh -drive format=raw,file=root/build/test/init.sqf < /dev/null 2>&1" goes:

AddressSanitizer:DEADLYSIGNAL
=================================================================
==20711==ERROR: AddressSanitizer: SEGV on unknown address (pc 0x7f2c7659de7e bp 0x5e24a6a36a05aade sp 0x5e24a6a36a05aade T0)
==20711==The signal is caused by a READ memory access.
==20711==Hint: this fault was caused by a dereference of a high value address (see register values below). Disassemble the provided pc to learn which register was used.
AddressSanitizer:DEADLYSIGNAL
AddressSanitizer: nested bug in the same thread, aborting.
AddressSanitizer:DEADLYSIGNAL
[Repeat twice more with different numbers]
AddressSanitizer: nested bug in the same thread, aborting.

There are no threads. Toybox is not a threaded program. It forks and backgrounds processes, but they are NOT THREADS.

I've been variants of under the weather for over a month (the stress isn't helping), and haven't even gone out to the apartment's front office since... new year's? Nor have I done a lot of sitting at the kitchen table counter-island-thing, because it's not very confortable (tall thin chair, doesn't really work for me), nor the desk in the bedroom (less uncomfortable, but still kind of terrible and I find the room claustrophobic.)

I currently have whatever cold Fade spent saturday through tuesday home sick with. (Monday was Not My President's Day and Tuesday was a snow day, so she got a 4 day weekend to be sick without having to use PTO for it. Wasn't HAPPY about going back to work on wednesday, but was capable thereof.) This is a different sickness from the one she had a couple weeks before that where she only managed to work 2 days out of 9, the rest being basically bedridden. Winter in Minnesota! And a public schoolteacher taking light rail to a bus to a half-dozen rooms full of small children each day tends to pick up ALL the colds. (Her employer warned her this would happen her first year, until her immune system ramps up to cope with an endless stream of small children.) At least it's warmed up enough it's not quite so BRUTALLY dry in here... merely painfully dry. Anyway, I been sick.

Fade had a tiny little wooden desk thing (it's a shelf on two folding legs) that she tried to use for her laptop on the bed, but the dog didn't like it (it dampened his cling). I've fished it out from under the bed and am trying it on the couch. It's... better than nothing?

I am tired and sick and grumpy. Fairly certain these are related.

Dreamhost wants money. They do this every 2 years, and given how often I lose/cancel debit cards they probably wouldn't keep a payment method on file if I DID give them one, so I tend to mail them a check. And every time I have to look up how to do that again, and they do NOT make it easy to find because it's not how they want stuff to go. I have been unable to find instructions on their website this time, and google is utterly useless now (I expect the AI feature would HAPPILY suggest a way to do that if I ever did a search that didn't end -ai these days, but I would NEVER send money to its suggestion), and Dreamhost's web page has a chatbot that tries to answer my question, fails, asks if I want a human, and then says humans are available monday through friday starting at 9am. Oh well, try again during normal business hours I guess...

Either LInux or Xfce randomly broke two finger scrolling. Digging into it, the problem is xfce's control panel is seeing two mouse sources: an ALPS GlidePoint touchpad (which has a two finger scrolling option in the touchpad tab, which is enabled), and an ALPS mouse, which does not have a touchpad tab. If I disable the "mouse" entry, the pointer freezes. If I disable the GlidePoint entry, there's no difference.

I'm not entirely sure when this broke, but it worked until recently. I didn't do anything obvious to break it. Thunderbird's UI is terrible enough as it is (I can't figure out how to get XFCE to give me the little move up/down by one line arrows at the end of scrollbars back, I had that before the forced version "upgrade" from Devuan Bronchitis to Devuan Diptheria but it no longer seems to be availiable because removing stuff is considered progress.

I note that hexchat still has the up/down arrows on its slider bars, because it's not using xfce's default window manager toolkit preferences. Which in this case is a good thing because I want ALL my apps to behave like hexchat is behaving. I wouldn't miss two finger scrolling if I had the darn up/down buttons back. (Clicking in the empty space int he slider above/below the grab thingy jumps by more than a full screen, meaning it misses entries. Open source development cannot do user interface design.)

Ken Burk had backups my the 2015 ELC talks, and sent me copies of my shrinking C code (outline) and toybox status update (outline) talks!

Thank you! (I poked Tim Bird in case he wants to get any of the others back online...)

Over on the gnu/coreutils gnu/mailman gnu/list somebody claimed the linux kernel's mineral rights for Richard Stallman, and while trying to write a civil reply I cut and pasted this out as too inflammatory for that list:

You realize that Stallman's entire rationale for sticking gnu/ on stuff was to claim credit for the larger system, because it's not like Coherent shipped the first full Unix clone 3 years before Stallman announced the FSF, BSD Net-1 shipped a year before Hurd (after starting work in either 1976 or 1974 depending whether you credit Bill Joy or Bob Fabry), and of course Linus developed his own kernel under Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix and announced it on comp.os.minix).

No, clearly nobody ever thought of cloning Unix except Stallman, and therefore it was his gnu/idea. Because his attempts to get people to stop calling it "Linux" at all failed back in 1998. (And when I read that page back in 1998, sadly I tried to explain marketing to RMS, which did not go well.)

Interestingly, Stallman himself said in the above ("his attempts") link that the first Hurd based system shipped in 1996, but Linux not only came out in 1991 (0.0.1 booted and ran) it already had its own mailing list (here's a few selected interesting posts from 1991 and 1992), having migrated off comp.os.minix when professor Tanenbaum got back from summer recess and objected to the off-topic project culminating in the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate. (There's no similar Stallman/Torvalds debate because Stallman didn't matter.)

Tanenbaum declared Linux as off-topic on his list because while it used Minix's filesystem format and compiled under minix, Tabenbaum did not claim ownership of Linux. He acknowledged it was a separate project, needing a separate discussion list. Meanwhile Stallman, who never submitted a patch to Linux or even put out a Linux distro, seamlessly transitioned from railing against Linux (insisting the Hurd would replace it) to retroactively trying to claim credit for Linux, and politically "embrace and extend" it ever since. He's also been keen to recapture errant forks such as glibc from Ulrich Drepper (see "And now for some not so nice things" at the end of this release announcement), or recapturing gcc from egcs with that "steering committee" business...

And now you're sticking GNU/ explicitly onto the _kernel_. I'm sure Alpine Linux (based on busybox) or Android (no GPL in userspace) would be happy to receive such a "correction".

Along the way I stumbled upon Oliver's page on this stuff, which is quite good (and I could probably add a dozen things to). I feel REALLY BAD about not being able to properly harness his enthusiasm. It's a me problem, and I know it. It seems like the kind of thing that could easily spin into the toybox version of Alpine Linux if I'd played my cards right, but I just don't have the skillset and have been curled into a ball at the prospect of "what the Boomers are going to break next" since moving out of Texas because politics and climate change had made staying untenable.

And then on my SECOND attempt at writing a civil on-topic reply, I cut THIS out and pasted it here, again as too inflammatory.

I keep thinking shell trap handling works differently than it actually does. Interactive shell editing is NOT interrupted by trap handlers:

$ trap 'echo hello' USR1
$ (sleep 1; kill -s USR1 $$)&
[1] 5531
$ so now what
hello
bash: so: command not found
[1]+ Done ( sleep 1; kill -s USR1 $$ )

Curled up in a ball for another week. I was functional-ish while caring for Fade, but now she's back at work and the Circular Firing Squad is of course causing yet more collateral damage. (The Boomers will die, and thus stop voting for every nigerian prince email and scam phone call. The crazy 27% is just a tie breaker, without the Boomers they go back to being a shouty minority. A 78 year old man with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy will die (and xi is 71, and putin is 72). A cult of personality is not transferrable. Florida is already uninsurable and will be uninhabitable soon. The EU as a whole generated more electricity from solar than from coal last year. Oligarchs only die of natural causes when they DON'T stir the pot. The rubble can be rebuilt around basic income, subsidized food and housing (instead of subsidized fossil fuels and suburbs), a proper right to privacy, and a policy of guillotining anyone who retains control of a billion dollars longer than 30 days. Dave Barry predicted Boomerdamarung back in 1996. The Boomers will die.)

I've spent so much time wearing headphones (listening to distractions) that I've developed an ear infection and had to stop wearing them for a bit. Quite possibly just a zit I picked at too much, but still. Alas, earbuds still cover it and I want it to heal, so...

If kexec needs to work from a single processor kernel (because I can't figure out how to get the second processor back into the power-on state, and I don't want to edit the turtle board startup code to handle two cases which each get half as much testing), then I need to be able to power cycle the Turtle board to get it to reload that UP kernel from which I can kexec the new kernel I want to test. That way, I can set up a remote test environment where I can boot a newly built kernel without sneakernet.

I know USB hardware can do this: I've read the specs and gone through low level programming registers for various hardware. The host can cut power to a device and restore power to a device. But it looks like Linux can't, because it did not occur to the Linux kernel clique that intentionally power cycling a USB device from software is a thing anyone would ever want to do.

It looks like there potentially used to be support but it was "improved" away. (Or at least attempts to write 0 and such to the control thingies under sysfs all say "illegal write: invalid argument" from sudo /bin/bash's echo, but they accept "auto" which is the default value and apparently the ONLY value so why does the knob exist...) And the various suggestions online about how to set the autosuspend timeout to 1 millisecond or unbind drivers from the device are both A) useless (the LEDs on the board stay on, it is clearly still getting power) and B) persistent (it doesn't work as a serial device anymore despite unplugging and replugging it, I think I need to reboot my laptop to get that back). They've replaced manual "do this" switches with automatic transmission nonsense that does the wrong thing in 5 different ways, all behind a black box.

All this is DESPITE the USB fan I was plugging into the thing when programming at the UT geology building's picnic tables (in the dead of summer when it was still 90 degrees at 2am) breaking a couple years back because Linux would power it down after 30 seconds despite being a dumb device like a USB book light. So the device I did NOT want to power down would power down, and the device I _do_ want to power down can't be powered down. The 6.x kernel! Knows better than you do, and will not let you gainsay its decisions.

I'm trying to get a "cursor up, press enter" style compile-and-test out of my turtle board, like I have with qemu. If I have to stop and fiddle with hardware then the friction of testing on turtle is way higher than testing in the emulator so I won't do it as often. (I know me.)

This is why I want kexec, so the kernel that loads from the sdcard doesn't have to be the kernel I'm testing. It's best to have a known good kernel boot first anyway, so I have easy recovery if I send it something that didn't work: if I was replacing the boot kernel on the sdcard and I gave it a bad one, I'm back to popping the card out and sneakernetting it back to the host to do recovery, and that's a pain. Being able to power cycle the board if I gave it a kernel that hangs is also generally good for test cycling: I need USB to be able to switch the board off and back on.

The rest of the stuff seems like a solved problem, if a bit awkward. The USB connection provides a serial console through which I can easily transfer files to the remote board via uuencode/uudecode and similar, so they wind up in initramfs without having to go to flash at all, avoiding wear and tear on the finite planned obsolescence technology capitalism moved us to (storage that wears out with use so you have to buy more). Power cycling the board means the Association of Computing Machinery serial port (/dev/ttyACM0) goes away and comes back, so I have to re-bind microcom or similar to it, but that all seems scriptable. (With sleeps and/or spinning.)

If it plugged into a wall outlet I could buy any number of "smart outlet" variants with bluetooth or serial connections for doing exactly this. But the problem is this USB connection also provides the serial port I want to talk to the device through. The problem is modern Linux kernels are _less_ capable than $15 crap from digikey.

Sigh. I'm going to wind up buying an outlet-powered USB hub just so I can power cycle THAT with a software controllable wall outlet, aren't I? Because the Linux kernel clique is too focused on rusting the kernel to pieces rather than actually letting people control the hardware.

One problem is kexec.c didn't redo the crt0.c setup from the bootloader, so when it enters the new kernel the inherited stack pointer is pointing into unclaimed memory and the registers aren't in a known state. That's probably part of the problem.

I still need to do my hello world kernel spinning writing to the serial port, because I need to stick printf() into stuff to debug things. When I can move the printf() I can see incremental progress. Without that it's just throwing darts at a bullseye and hoping to get lucky.

By the way: sh2eb-linux-muslfdpic-cc --static -s kexec3.c && toybox uuencode kexec < a.out | xclip -sel c and then in the turtle board run uudecode with no arguments and paste the clipboard into the terminal. Easy way to fling a binary onto the board via serial console. Of course this would be more convenient if running the binary DIDN'T brick the board and require me to power cycle it each time, but for NORMAL compile-and-test cycles on an embedded board, that's an old trick and part of the reason uuencode/uudecode is in toybox.

The kexec I wrote for turtle doesn't work yet.

The first problem is putting CPU1 back into the state the kernel expects isn't really possible with this hardware. At power on, CPU1 starts in a perpetual memory read stall with the Vector Base Register set to 0, and you have CPU0 poke a register to unblock it, at which point it runs a reset interrupt loading PC from vbr[0] and SP from vbr[1]. The turtle SOC maps a small SRAM at physical address 0 (ouch) so Linux SMP bringup just has to write two pointers to the zero page and poke the unblock register.

Note that this stall unblock register is NOT in board.h, it's memory mapped off in la-la land. It's mentioned in the bootloader device tree but it's not a properly documented hardware block. So that's nice.

The problem is, when SMP Linux is already up I can run code on CPU1 (using the same taskset+SCHED_RR trick I use to take over CPU0), and I can lobotomize the interrupt controller (typecast DEVICE_AIC0_ADDR from board.h to (unsigned *), then aic[0] = 0 to stop the Programmable Interval Timer, and aic[3] = 0 to mask IRQs, although in this case I'd probably want to use DEVICE_AIC1_ADDR to write to CPU1's interrupt controller instead). And I THINK I can even put CPU1 back into the stall state (write a 0 into the control register). But I can't call a reset interrupt from assembly, it's not a normal raiseable interrupt.

What I need is for CPU1 to go into the read stall WHILE trying to run the reset interrupt. It should block trying to read the PC from memory location 0. Otherwise, when it unblocks it's going to read the next instruction from wherever PC points to and try to execute it, and when I hand off to the new kernel no area of memory is guaranteed not to get rewritten (not even that zero page), so whatever PC points to is unprotected. (The most precise control would be to have CPU1 do the stall poke, but then it would try to advance to the next instruction when unblocked. I might be able to do Branch Delay Slot shenanigans to have that advance go anyway, although in that case (possibly ANY case due to CPU pipelining?) it would read and decode the next instruction from the old memory contents before hanging trying to do a read from more memory at some point down the line. (It's a 5 stage pipeline, instruction read is always at LEAST one clock ahead of execution.)

In theory there's a design element to fix this! Jeff thought about it, and if you write 7 (bottom 3 bits set) to that PIT control register in AIC, it should reboot that processor. Unfortunately, the contractor who implemented it didn't hook that reset line UP to anything. (It raises a reset line that's not plugged in. Great. Well we never tested this in FPGA, that was an ASIC feature. Different SOC layout.)

I can change the vmlinux bringup code to take control of CPU1 via an IPI (have the reset vector go to an infinite loop and then the IPI jumps us to the real entry point), but changing the kernel's bringup for kexec is a bit dodgy.

So I punted on all that and built a non-SMP kernel, and just wrote a very simple KEXEC that doesn't mess with CPU1 at all. That way you can have a simple stage 2 bootloader (UP linux) that hands off to an SMP kernel, and CPU1 is in the state it's been programmed to bring up. Just load the kernel into memory, SCHED_RR ourselves, disable AIC0, do the ELF relocation, and jump to the entry point. The downside is you can't kexec from the REAL kernel (yet anyway), and to do automated boot tests you'd need to be able to power the USB port down and back up to forcibly reset the board (there's likely a /sys/bus/usb thingy I can poke at, the fact /dev/ttyACM0 goes away and comes back each time this happens is awkward but a script can work around it).

And it hangs. No further output from the board. Which is always the most annoying kind of thing to try to debug.

The new ELC call for papers came out, and I find I have nothing I want to say to the community. I'm happy to learn go, zig, oberon... I would LOVE more excuses to do lua. But the last version of the kernel I can patch rust out of is the last version I run. (And python 3 goes in the GPLv3 bucket: you can pay me to do it, but never for free.)

Fade was out sick wednesday and thursday (teaching tuesday trashed her voice to full laryngitis), and is in today so she doesn't fall TOO far behind then has the weekend to recover. I still haven't fully recovered from whatever this is either (cough cough), but am doing my best to be a dutiful wife for the breadwinner of the house.

Had a long call with Jeff walking through the turtle VHDL code, and I think I understand the pieces needed to implement kexec now. Or at least we tracked down the answer to all the questions I knew to ask. (Half the output of this should be BETTER DOCUMENTATION.)

Fade took monday off, but has now gone back to work. Where was I...

So I was adding sh_fcall layers from the signal handler, but that meant two consecutive references to TT.ff might not refer to the same structure instance, and about halfway through triaging all the call_function() instances to make sure we were consistently using the returned pointer rather than fiddling with TT.ff to initialize the new object, hit the one in run_command() and traced through the use of the "prefix" variable and just went "this is not sustainable" and changed to having a separate linked list of pending signals which the handler appends to (registered to be called with all signals blocked until it returns so two handlers don't interfere with each other) and then run_lines() processes under sigprocmask(sigemptyset()) as the other half of the locking.

This of course meant I didn't NEED all the changes to make sure sh_fcall initializers were using the returned value instaead of the global list pointer, and backing them out was where I transplanted the cleanup work I was doing to run_command() over to the _previous_ checkpoint (in the toybox/toybox directory, as apposed to its extension in toybox/clean3).

Which means the "TT.signal" value I added and nobody uses can go away again because that was my first stab before going "no, I can leave THAT signal blocked until the loop handles it but I can't leave all the OTHER signals blocked, so this needs to be a list of signals seen, meaning I can't trust atomic assignment but have to make sure signals are disabled in both places the list is modified".

This is fundamentally the same problemthat adding to TT.ff had, but that list also has a bunch of USERS that could be inconvenienced by the list changing out from under them, and the new list has no existing users who aren't being, sigh: essentially thread-safe, about it. (I can DO threaded programming. OS/2 was heavily threaded, SMP in the kernel is "threaded but slightly worse", and realtime programming on bare hardware is often the same general mindset. I just don't WANT to when I don't HAVE to, it's like introducing nuclear isotopes into an engineering project: containment is key, if it spreads all over the place it will not end well, and it's so much easier to just not go there in the first place. This still ISN'T threading, meaning all libc internal locking nonsense isn't necessary. Signal handling already has its own rules about what is and isn't safe to call from signal context. So does vfork() child context, just generally not as explicitly documented. :)

Current status: doing "diff -pu file1.c file2.c | nl | less" to work out the line ranges so I can do (as it turned out) diff -pu ./toys/*/sh.c ../toybox/toys/*/sh.c | sed '3,28d;132,$d' | patch -p1" and yes the ./ on the first argument was so patch -p1 had the appropriate number of directory levels to eat. (I _could_ have added enough to match the other one, but it tries both and takes either one that works.)

Because it's easier than manually editing the patches, that's why.

What happened was I was in the middle of a largeish structural change to a file, encountered a hunk of code I really needed to clean up to reason through how it worked (another way to say it is that reasoning through how it worked suggested multiple simplifications, mostly leftover scar tissue from before the most recent round of changes) and then I wanted to check in just that part because the change was getting huge and it's good to have checkpoints. So I diverged into trying to split up a large change, which is itself a lot of work.

*shrug* The usual.

Trying to do kexec for j-core (turtle boards), because it came up recently and I think the guys in japan could use it too. It basically lets us use Linux as a stage 2 bootloader, so you can just power cycle a turtle and feed it a kernel+initramfs+cmdline (and maybe dtb) so test cycles don't involve sneakernet but could be done entirely remotely/automatically. Heck, you could feed it a tarball over serial console, or have the builtin ethernet wget something from a web server. You have linux running arbitrary initramfs as your secondary bootloader.

Since this is a nommu board, I can theoretically do all this from userspace, although it's a bit awkward. Jeff pointed me at the existing bootloader code that loads an ELF image: basically just a series of flash load commands that grab the header, confirm it looks like the right kind of ELF, iterates through the program header segments loading each PT_LOAD entry into memory at its p_vaddr, copying p_filesz many bytes from storage and zeroing from the end of that to p_memsz. (Presumably bss has a zero filesz?) If I pass a vmlinux pointer in RAM the result is just an ELF32_Ehdr typecast at the start, a for loop over Elf32_Phdr array,

1. Verify the ELF header looks good
2. Make sure the code is running on CPU 0
3. Halt CPU 1
4. Stop the PIT and AIC (timer and interrupt controller)
5. Load the ELF segments and zero bss.
6. jump to entry point

The ELF header check and relocation are easy enough to port from the bootloader code, the big change is swapping out the flash_load() calls with memmove() calls, although I simplified it a bit.

The relevant guts of taskset for putting ourselves on CPU0 is just long x = 1; sched_setaffinity(getpid(), sizeof(x), &x); usleep(100);

The header check is making sure it's the right kind of ELF and e_phnum (the program header count) isn't more than 4 segments (presumably code, data, rodata, bss).

The relocation iterates through the program header segments loading each PT_LOAD entry into memory at its p_vaddr, copying p_filesz many bytes from storage and zeroing from the end of that to p_memsz. (Presumably bss has a zero filesz.) If I pass a vmlinux pointer in RAM the result is just an ELF32_Ehdr typecast at the start, a for loop over Elf32_Phdr array checking p_type==PT_LOAD and calling memmove() and memset(), and then a void (*e_entry)(void) function pointer call.

I've got the header check first, the taskset, and then the relocation code at the end, followed by the jump to the entry point. Turtle vmlinux is conventional ELF so it's all absolute addresses, meaning I don't even have to calculate relative to the start of physical memory or anything, just copy and jump where it says in the file.

But between the taskset and the relocation is the quiescing of the old kernel, and that's a pain. Trying to read through device tree code and kernel's arch/sh/kernel/cpu/sh2/smp-j2.c is NOT FUN. The C code is looking up cpu-release-addr out of the device tree, but arch/sh/boot/dts/j2_mimas_v2.dts hasn't got that field... Ah, because the device tree it's actually USING is the one out of the boot ROM, and that DOES have it (in cpu@1) which says we're writing 0x8000 to address 0xabcd0640. But that's to ENABLE the second processor, what do I do to DISABLE it?

(I could also have my kexec command fork(), taskset the child to the second processor, renice() itself to hard realtime priority, spin in a for (;;) loop for a quarter second, and then call the assembly HLT instruction. Giving CPU0 time to switch off the timer and interrupt controller. But that involves inline assembly, asynchronous timeouts... smells a bit janky.)

In THEORY, stopping CPU1, stopping the interrupt controller, and stopping the timer is three pokes.

I really hope there isn't a race where an interrupt can happen the clock AFTER we write to the AIC to disable interrupts, so we wind up in the kernel and it can't get back OUT again, stuck in some kernel thread or something. I don't THINK so? Question for Jeff...

Trying to finish the trap instruction, but it's hard to concentrate when it's so dry breathing HURTS. (And that's _with_ three humidifers going full time.) I can't pace the halls because THAT's so dry I have to come in and chug a beverage after five minutes. Not doing wonders for my sleep schedule either.

My blog doesn't have comments so I get emails and/or mastodon posts, and one of the emails replying to a post said:

Kind of like how the Thumb2-base of CortexM4 patent expired, I am curious as to whether DM&P needed an x86 license to produce the 386. While it's been 40 years since the 386 was made, would they try to block the manufacture of it at 22nm or 40nm in large enough numbers? (Also, there might not be as much demand- with new generations preferring phones that can run tiktok apps and youtube, etc...but still)

To which I replied:

Linux yanked 386 support and made 486 the baseline years ago because they wanted to assume the existence of lockless atomic cmpxchg. (Even UP kernels can take interrupts in the middle of stuff these days, and leverage the SMP plumbing to task switch out of the middle of system calls, mostly to run high priority kernel tasklets outside of interrupt context.)

That said a 486 might have some demand, but the thing is JIT compiling of bytecode was a big deal back in the 90s, then transmeta proved you can support foreign instruction sets relatively cheaply back in 2000, and qemu kinda took over the world translating a page of instructions at a time and keeping the cached ones around (even with the first dyngen code) and was everywhere by around 2005.

And of course apple had the m68k->ppc transition, the ppc->intel transition, and the intel->arm transition each with an emulation layer for running old binaries doing JIT-style dynamic translation of one instruction set to another.

The thing about the x86 instruction set is it's a horrible hack of extension prefixes where the longest documented instruction is something like 17 bytes.

Of course an odd byte length means means the instruction starts are not aligned, so jumps need all the bits of precision and can't cheat like other architectures do. Now ask yourself what happens when instruction decoding crosses a page boundary and requires a cache line fetch which fails and generates a fault partway THROUGH instruction decoding. There have been security thingies about that!

This is why nobody wants to clone an x86 chip. If you're going for big fire breathing 64 bit extensively vectorized parallel nonsense, half your chip is going to be an x86 translation and reordering pipeline (which was true back in the original Pentium) which is a recipe for security problems (like spectre/meltdown) and you'll waste tons of effort discarding speculative execution results which means power consumption sucks because you're doing a lot of work you don't keep. And if you want something small and power efficient, just do something sane like j-core and then run a dynamic translation layer to run legacy x86 binaries.

I do long writeups in email all the time, I just thought I'd copy and paste that one here because I haven't been blogging reliably ever since the return of fascism became likely. Kinda undermines the desire to do anything productive instead of just repeating "The Boomers will die" as a calming mantra.

Toybox 0.8.12 is out.

I am very tired.

Ok, the release notes are caught up. I'm not happy with the paragraph breaks in it (too chopped up), then again collating different topics into a big run-on sentence isn't great either. But that's nitpicking.

I rebuilt the mkroot targets against linux-6.13-rc7 and there were no obvious differences: the same patches apply, and the same targets pass. I was thinking of waiting for 6.13 proper but even if that does happen this sunday, with the reichstag fire scheduled for monday I need to get this out of the way NOW, while I can still convince myself programming has meaning. (My burst of productivity has already shrunk to every other day. Yes the worst people in the world are forming a circular firing squad just like last time, but nowhere is safe to stand when that happens. Schedenfreude isn't the same as hope, and it's hard to program productively while simultaneously longing for a carrington event leading to kessler syndrome.) So I'm going with 6.12 this time.

Of course mkroot/testroot.sh fails all the targets in a clean checkout because I still need to manually patch the timeout line to call /bin/bash instad of bash out of the $PATH, because otherwise toysh has an alias for bash so toybox calls the internal command and I haven't tracked down what's going wrong here and fixed it in toysh yet (workaround found, todo list entry added, haven't gotten back to it yet). But I don't want to open any new development cans of worms THIS release, and am not holding the release for anything in toys/pending even if it IS load bearing pending. (A category that should not exist.)

I need to tag a commit to build relese binaries (so --version says the right thing), and I should check in the release notes to do so, and there's always a bit of a chicken and egg problem here in that I want to check in the release notes at the last possible moment in case I hit something while cutting the release, but need the tag to build the binaries I'm testing and uploading... Circular dependencies!

This is why I have a release checklist. First thing in it: make distclean defconfig tests" which fails because of that toolchain bug I hit when I upgraded debian versions. Right, add a release note about switching off mkpasswd to pass "make tests", because of the debian ASAN toolchain bug breaking crypt(). (Toolchain bug! Like pending: not holding up the release! Yes I could de-promote mkpasswd like I did passwd, but... NEXT release.)

The version lives in 3 places (grumble): toys.h and www/header.html need to match www/news.thml, but since 2 of those are documentation it's kinda awkward to have a Single Point of Truth for that.

Ah: scripts/mkstatus.py (to update the status.html page) says #!/usr/bin/python, which Devuan Deathwish (I.E. Debian Brainworm) removed from the repository for being too useful. (The path no longer having "python" in it, just "python3", would be like the path no longer having "cc" just "c++". Or just "c99" (which is what posix said to do, because posix was fscking stupid). Nope, that's not how it works. Yes I need to move off of python now that "python" no longer exists, and Ray Gardner did send me an awk rewrite of the rss generator for this blog, but I am NOT fiddling with scripts/mkstatus.py right now. (It will never be rewritten in python++. I might do a bash version, but mostly I want to make the NEED for it go away by finishing and promoting enough stuff.)

Luckily, since python was open source back when it wasn't dead, the source and build instructions are still available, and I can feed it /usr/local/bin as the prefix because it's easy to wipe and reinstall all that if I need to. (Mine's just got toybox, qemu, and now python 2 in it.) I'm not adding whatever LFS's security patch was, nor installing any optional packages... heh, autoconf didn't even find a c++ compiler. (It's in the $PATH. Needed to build musl-cross-make toolchains. Dunno why that faceplanted but it's apparently only needed for modules I didn't use...)

Of course since I didn't install it at /usr/bin (because I'm not mixing repository and locally compiled packages at the same level) I have to say "python scripts/mistatus.py" but that's fine. Except THAT still fails because despite ./configure and install knowing where it put the files, it tries to load a shared library it can't find. (The BLFS instructions didn't say how to statically link it.) Ok, prepend LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib and... yay, it ran.

Yay, the release note writing process has consumed all the toybox commits up to the master tag! I am caught up, and can cut a release!

Alas, this is step one of like two dozen, and I'm tired now.

I've been trying to finish and commit the shell trap builtin, but I may have to punt it to next release.

I want to queue up the shell function from the signal handler, but leave the signal disabled, and only re-enable it _after_ the shell function returns. The recent redesign allows me to add a new sh_fcall layer with a function call from signal context, but if you spam signals to the shell I don't want it to interrupt the signal handler function call in the middle with the same signal again. But I don't want to DROP them either, or at least the same signal coming in while the signal is being handled should probably be queued to restart (one instance of) the signal handler at the end. (So you can still stunlock the shell with constant signals, but not establish a BACKLOG for it to process.)

So what I want to do is leave the signal blocked when I exit the signal handler. I _think_ what I do for that is use sigaction(SA_SIGINFO) and then toggle the appropriate bit in context->uc_sigmask, because man 7 signal says the kernel restores the signal mask from that when the signal handler returns? (How would I test this?)

The function to atomically re-enable the signal mask when popping the fcall stack is sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK). If I call sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK) from within the signal handler, would that leave it blocked when it returns? I don't THINK so, it's already blocked in the current signal mask while the signal handler is running and then the old signal mask is restored on return from the function, sigprocmask() would have to know to modify the signal mask that's waiting to be restored. I actually hit a bash bug in 2011 where longjmp() out of the signal handler left the signal handler blocked, and bash was doing that and thus my shell script having an alarm timeout left SIGALRM blocked for all children, causing autoconf to hang in an aboriginal linux build. (I debugged into the kernel and back out again finding that one.) But "it used to do it this way doesn't mean it still DOES", is something I've ALSO hit on multiple occasions. And alas "try it and see" then becomes "Does macos have this field of this structure with the same name treated the same way? What does posix say? Where would this even BE in posix if it is mentioned..."

Another fun corner case is the vfork() callback setting up children needs to restore all the signal handlers to their default values, because who knows what's blocked at any given moment.

And then, of course, there's interrupting/restarting builtins. The main reason I'm NOT trying to use signalfd() for all this is I want to make sure blocking builtins like "read" and "wait" (and for that matter echo > /dev/thing-that-blocks) get handled properly. So what counts as "properly"? Should they abort? Restart their operation? I can't REALLY execute arbitrary shell stuff in the same process and then return to the middle of a shell builtin function, that's a recipe for disaster. (Do a blocking "read i" and have a signal handler assign to i in the middle, without leaking memory; I mean MAYBE, but...)

Right now everything's mostly trying to SA_RESTART so the OS restarts the operation behind the scenes when you do things like suspend/resume the process. Which is a signal delivery, which causes syscalls to return short reads and -EAGAIN, and yes I hit this years ago, and it broke stuff I had to fix. (That wasn't even the first time, before THAT suspending and resuming pipelines could return zero length reads that piping stuff to tar interpreted as premature EOF. Because tar or gzip or whatever it was didn't check EAGAIN when it got the zero length read, and wasn't doing the SA_RESTART thing that made the kernel auto-restart instead of returning EAGAIN except (at the time) there were times it COULD still return EAGAIN so you still had to check! Probably all fixed now, but I was gun-shy about suspending and resuming piped processes for years after that.)

Anyway, getting signal handling basically in: easy. Thinking through all the corner cases and making sure they're covered (and working out what the right behavior even IS): not easy.

So if you SIGSTOP/SIGCONT the shell while doing a "wait" it probably should NOT return prematurely. If you kill SIGUSR1 with a trap 'echo hello' USR1 it should presumably print "hello" immediately. The question is, does it then RESUME waiting? Which means restarting the builtin, since that had to return.

If you "echo $MEGABYTE_OF_CRAP" to something that accepts the data as multiple short writes (like a serial port), and the echo gets interrupted by a signal, you clearly don't want it to restart at the beginning, just flush the REST of the data...

All this stuff boils down to coming up with tests that demonstrate a corner case it needs to get right. Alas, that's REALLY HARD...

Trying to close things down for a release makes the todo list longer, every single time. I've been reminded to resurrect my diff rewrite at the start of next dev cycle.

Going through and auditing the github issues and pull requests for things I've already closed, or anything that's REALLY easy to fix. The current process involves finding the date the commit/issue was opened, fishing through my email archive to find the email sent to me, and doing a "reply list" to that which goes to the magic hash that appends my comment to the relevant discussion.

And I made a gitwhack.sh script that takes the number of the issue or pull request to close as its argument (they seem to share a namespace), prepends a "Closes #123" comment to an explanatory file about microsoft github embracing and extending away my access to the web interface, the commit itself being "touch dummy; git add dummy; git commit blah; rm dummy", pushes the commit, waits 5 seconds to make sure microsoft's server side processing gets to do all its data harvesting and AI training, and then "git reset HEAD^1; git push --force" to expunge the commit from the history. And a local git gc for good measure.

Seriously, if I'd EVER responded well to ultimatums my entire career would have progressed very differently.

Huh, Elliott hit a thing, and I don't see anything obvious in his wrapper that would cause it? Says #!/bin/bash at the top, which should work? It's not reproducing here, the test works for me when built with the Android NDK. I want to help but I'm just not seeing it...

I went "git log master..0.8.11" which produced no output, because it only accepts "git log 0.8.11..master". (Why not show the range in reverse order? I know there's some sort of --reverse option somewhere, but git UI having "good" and "bad" hardwired backwards half the time is not a new issue.)

And then "git --stat log 0.8.11..master" barfed and I'm going "is it --status or something?" and read through "git help log" (I.E. man git-log) forever until line one thousand, seven hundred, and forty six finally went "no, it's --stat". Because it's "git log --stat" not "git --stat log", of course.

I'm a bit out of practice with git, and not instinctively avoiding all the sharp edges its UI is constructed entirely out of.

Anyway, time to make the release notes. (We've ALMOST got linux-6.13 out, I should retest everything against -rc6 and wait, but if I don't get a release out before the 20th I suspect my mental health may take a dip again.)

Mailing list threads! I mostly haven't been blogging here, instead there's the long thread on qemu-devel that eventually wandered to linux-sh and and from there to private email about the turtle ethernet driver, various posts on linux-embedded about the boot time stuff that were mostly me doing unsolicited computer history infodumps at people, plus some things that would have been blogs went to the toybox list instead just because I've been so behind on editing and uploading entries for so long that if I _want_ interactive feedback from people, putting it here is kind of moot. (I figured the issue out on my own anyway...)

Been busy, which remains a bit of a relief. It's just hard to tell from the commits and list posts because I have SO MUCH BACKLOG to shovel through now I'm out of the rut I was in. (Off to find a NEW rut. "A whole new rut..." to the tune of Aladdin.)

I think I've cleaned up the mkroot images about as much as I can at the moment, and confirmed that at least two of the targets that still fail require patching qemu instead of the kernel. Punt to next release.

Alas, musl-1.2.5 from 11 months ago is still the current release, so not much point rebuilding the toolchains (and I need to migrate off musl-cross-make anyway). Punt THAT to next release.

Sitting on my hands about more shell work before release. I've done most of "trap" support locally, need to fix the remaining $BROKEN tests' underlying issues and have SO many more tests in local "sh.txt" notes-to-self files. I can probably do command editing and history now (I long ago learned that a polished GUI makes people assume the plumbing must be all done), and triage the TODO entries in sh.c... Ahem. Release first.

In a conversation on qemu-devel I said:

There are some targets I have to poke harder, armv5l and armv4tl have QEMU="arm -M versatilepb -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user" for some reason... Huh, apparently I've been doing that since 2007?

And digging through my blog I found the commit saying "switch to using the rtl8139 driver because PIO doesn't work on the qemu-system-arm PCI controller yet so I need something with mmio." Maybe that's fixed by now and I can go back to the default network card there?

So hw/arm/versatilepb.c says the default is smc91c111 and the kernel driver for that is CONFIG_SMC91X but it won't enable because kconfig has (!OF [=y] || GPIOLIB [=y]) in one of its stanzas, so if you ENABLE device tree support it DISABLES the driver, unless you enable some extraneous GPIO support library I _actively_ don't want to have to care about, which seems like it's "selected" by 8 zillion things in a horrificly micromanaged staircase.

Why does this driver not have a "selects GPIOLIB" if it needs it? Why would it have a BLOCKING DEPENDENCY that prevents the driver from showing UP if something unrelated isn't selected, instead of just SELECTING IT?

This sort of cleanup is hard because I have to repeatedly prove a negative. But minimizing variables is science, and "circle the pot widdershins three times for luck" is alchemy. Accumulating endless dependencies is NOT SCIENCE.

Anyway, fixed now I should copy the relevant text back into the original conversation...

And the TODO item that comes out of this is figuring out how to use the provided example to add -hda for or1k...

Nuts to your white mice.

The sh4eb network thing is weird, when I sntp or wget, eth0 lists a bunch of dropped packets, but loopback shows the same number of packets sent/received. I don't even know how you'd screw that up, but it smells kernel-side? I also tried qemu 9.2 and 8.0 and it behaved the same way, so probably not qemu. Which makes sense since qemu shouldn't know what the loopback interface IS, that's an abstraction within the kernel not emulated hardware.

I hate when I bisect a problem (in this case the sh4eb kernel not seeing qemu's emulated hard drive) to a merge commit. Right, two parents, first parent works, second parent panics during boot because "irq123: nobody cared". Use "git describe" on that second parent to find the last tagged commit, check the tag: which works. Bisect between the tag and the parent commit... And the breakage is "sh: Convert the last use of 'optional' property in Kconfig" which seems like it's just mangling config stuff? Except diffing the .config files produced by the two commits, the change is adding CONFIG_CMDLINE_OVERWRITE=y and CONFIG_CMDLINE="console=ttySC1,115200" which doesn't SEEM like it would cause this, but... The patch itself is adding CONFIG_CMDLINE_FROM_BOOTLOADER=y to a bunch of defconfigs, which is the DUMBEST SYMBOL EVER. (The default value is NOT to listen to the bootloader, but to use a hardwired command line. That's the DEFAULT now. You have to switch on a symbol to NOT do that. Bravo.) Ok, add the symbol to my miniconfig to tell it not to be so FUCKING STUPID, and... working again. What does that do to 6.12... and that's working.

So once again just bisecting where a new config symbol needed to be flipped. Wheee. The network card's still borked though, although now it THINKS it's working, but no packets are passed and attempts to use it time out.

Fixing up the mkroot targets: microblaze's network isn't working, because the ethernet driver isn't binding. Checking current qemu's source, qemu-system-microblaze is running -M petalogix-s3adsp1800 which runs the qemu source qemu/hw/microblaze/petalogix_s3adsp1800_mmu.c which is pulling in qemu/pc-bios/petalogix-s3adsp1800.dts, which says compatible = "xlnx,xps-ethernetlite-2.00.a" which lines up with EMACLITE from mkroot.sh's microblaze section.

So it's TRYING to enable the driver, but although that string is in the miniconfig it does not wind up in the resulting root/microblaze/docs/linux-fullconfig, why is that... Grepping the 6.12 kernel source, drivers/net/ethernet/xilinx/Kconfig says config XILINX_EMACLITE depends on HAS_IOMEM, which grep does not find under arch/microblaze at all. According to "git annotate" that dependency was added in commit 46fd4471615c in April 2021 by Randy Dunlap to fix a build break, and git describe --tags on that hash says v5.12-rc7, so back up to the last release before that...

Huh. I did a git checkout v5.12 which SEEMS like a thinko (that's the release AFTER that -rc7, not the one before), but the dependency isn't there in the file and "git log" is saying the 46fd commit _isn't_ in v5.12? And doing a "git log" from the 46fd commit doesn't find the hash for the 5.12 release. I think there's some git branch shenanigans going on here, git describe is finding a misleading last common ancestor. Oh well, the point is v5.12 is a release that does NOT have the commit.

Alas, my first attempt at feeding the current miniconfig into 5.12 does not give me any serial output from qemu, and rather than debug THAT let's just build the board's defconfig... huh, arch/microblaze/configs only has one file "mmu_defconfig". Microblaze was one of the first nommu targets I was introduced to, but while this arch has a nommu build option the kernel ships no defconfig for it. How nice. Anyway, it built, and using the run-qemu.sh command line against the vmlinux... broke with a register dump. Try the other endianness? That's spinning eating cpu, hung with no output.

This smells familiar.... because it is. Except 6 months ago was 2 kernel releases back tops, so I was trying to get something like 6.10 working, not 5.12. (Did this EVER work for me? The downside of a year out of control is I'm not entirely sure what my baseline was and switching debian versions and different qemu builds underneath mkroot, it's a bit of shoveling to reestablish a baseline.) Still, let's try firing up menuconfig and switching the endianness... nope. The resulting vmlinux hangs for 8 seconds, _then_ barfs with "unaligned PC=12" whatever that means.

Right. So if 5.12 builds the driver witout either the spurious dependency or the reported build break, but doesn't produce serial output so I can't TEST it, that's the classic "too many variables changed" problem of doing science outside of laboratory conditions. I have a mostly working current (6.12) build, let's walk back from the version I can TEST through the older kernel versions to see where the miniconfig stops producing serial output. (It's not "looking for my keys under the streetlamp" if I use the streetlamp as a base camp and install a chain of mirrors to build an illuminated path out from that to where I last saw the keys. It's just tedious. Or "systematic" if you're feeling posh.)

Ok, 6.10 works, 6.5 works, 6.0 works. The 5.x series goes to 5.19 so 5.15... no output. Ok, git bisect between the v5.15 and v6.0 tags, but once again I have to reverse "good" and "bad" because the old one is broken and the new one is working and git calls the old behavior "good" and new "bad" which is was always a terrible assumption. Bisect, bisect, bisect... commit 8f0f265e6cf5 made it start working again, which replaced the "memset" implementation because gcc 10 apparently introduced a stupid "optimization" that turned providing your own memset implementation into a recursive call to itself. (Libc is not special!) That commit went in on top of 5.18-rc1, so how far back does the patch apply to unbreak earlier versions with current compilers? Hmmm, it applies to v5.12 but the result still produces no output... So bisect between THOSE, and commit f8f0d06438e5 is what made it start producing output. (Sigh: global kconfig shenanigans.) Ok, checkout v5.12 and apply BOTH those patches to it and... I get a shell prompt! Woo! But still no network interface. Fire up menuconfig and pull up the symbol help... it's because of an unmet dependency on a gratuitous CONFIG_NET_VENDOR_XILINX menu guard symbol. And NOW the ethernet interface showed up.

Hang on, was THAT the missing symbol back in 6.12? The gratuitous menu guard? Yes it was, and now the network is present there too. Kind of a long walk to get there, but hey, problem solved.

So next question, why isn't -hda working... Because the board qemu emulates has 16 megabytes of flash but no other obvious storage devices, and no probeable busses (pci, usb, etc) to dynamically attach storage to. So they didn't wire -hda up to anything because there's no obvious way to dynamically insert a hard drive (nothing for it to attach to). Sigh, I suppose it could use a network block device, but part of what I'm trying to TEST on each of these boards is block device support. I suspect I need another mkroot variable that's "how to add -hda" since qemu decided to abandon -hda as a reliable user interface concept. I can export a variable into the run-qemu (sigh at the clutter, but doable) but how to _use_ it when everything else is just "./run-qemu.sh -hda file.img"...