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On recent driver revisions for Linux x86_64 (this does not apply to AArch64 NVIDIA drivers at this time), NVIDIA shipped firmware for a new coprocessor, the GPU System Processor. This coprocessor uses the RISC-V instruction set. The current revisions of the GSP firmware has code for TU10x (Turing), GA100 (Ampere datacenter), GA10x (Ampere) and Gnext… Continue reading NVIDIA GSP Firmware

Microsoft has an edge SQL Server product that is also available on Arm in addition of x86 processors, offering core functionality. However, forget about .NET extensibility, snapshots, replication and other features that are excluded from this product. The Developer edition is limited to 4 cores and 32GB of RAM. Azure SQL Edge can be pulled… Continue reading SQL Server on Arm

(Part 1 at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/01/thoughts-on-tachyum/, let’s assume that most Tachyum claims are true) Tachyum is a company saying that their VLIW processor will change computing, being a “universal processor” that can be used for all workloads. They still claim that they’ll be able to ship their Prodigy processor this year. According to them, they were able… Continue reading Thoughts on Tachyum (part 2)

9 days ago, I pushed to https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/pull/151 a more complete mrustc on macOS branch including Apple Silicon support, to have an alternative Rust compiler available for the platform. The patch-set is tested with Rust 1.29.0. mrustc’s Rust 1.39.0 support is not quite complete yet at this point in time. Notes: Rust 1.29.0 does not officially… Continue reading mrustc on macOS

Visual Studio today (the IDE) is still a 32-bit x86 application. How well does it run on a Windows on Arm machine? Disclaimer: This workflow might not be officially supported currently, and might still come with some unfixed bugs. The good news is that you can just use the regular Visual Studio installation flow. After… Continue reading Visual Studio on an Arm Windows machine

I ordered an iPad Air (again) on Sunday and picked it up on Monday. So far, it’s quite good, with the Apple Pencil being the killer feature of the device. Scribble is what makes it shine, and what i’m writing this blog post with. It allows to just write text anywhere with the pencil to… Continue reading Not-an-iPad-review

I’ve been reading this blog post. (titled “Heads up: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS”) The headline by itself already sets the tone for what’s next in the article. First, repositories added by default in the OS are not considered as “secret”. I’ll however give a pass to that headline as… Continue reading Open source rhetoric? or FUD?

On a side note, a jailbroken iOS device has security protections equivalent to a macOS system with SIP off and AMFI off. That’s not a good place to be security-wise. A complete AMFI disable is used there instead of a more complex mechanism to not give private entitlements to everyone. The state of the iOS… Continue reading Things to not do on Apple OSes: disabling AMFI

(NVIDIA Xavier Series SoC Technical Reference Manual 1.4p, page 576) One of the few general purpose processors in the wild with sequential consistency is the NVIDIA Carmel CPU core, present on the Tegra Xavier processor. The 64-bit Tegra K1 (with Denver) also implements sequential consistency as the memory model. It also had a coherent instruction… Continue reading Arm CPUs with sequential consistency

Yet another one… and this time in buildable form on Apple M1 devices. (tarball at https://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/xnu/xnu-7195.81.3.tar.gz) What are the Apple CPU extensions not supported though on the OSS codebase? Turns out that the answer is almost all of them. A non exhaustive list: APRR (was explicitly removed for this release): permission removal mechanism, notably used… Continue reading Notes on the new XNU source release