Notes from yesterdays London meeting 4/8/16

[Sevan Janiyan <venture37%geeklan.co.uk@localhost>]

IBM - not so bad in some places, not the leader it once was though
Microsoft Retail trying to be all Apple-like
Performance at Microsott Retail doesn't go as planned
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/machine-gun-kelly-rapper-microsoft-video_n_1932879.html
Use of assembly in rspamd to work around compiler miss-optimisation
Running rspamd on MIPS & ARM hardware when codebase targetted at x86
currently
DJB's boringcc proposal
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/boring-crypto/48qa1kWignU/o8GGp2K1DAAJ
Being bitten by the assumption around the value of BUFSIZ on different
operating systems
Adding a swap file to FreeBSD/arm running on a PI brings the system down
cat.c in GNU coreutils
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/cat.c;hb=1c17f61ef993a5ee5fb0d3bc47b7b25782ae386c
The levels of indirection in GNU cat.c
FreeBSD cat(1) has socket support
When will Microsoft die? - apparently after Windows 7 support has ended
& people are forced to upgrade to 10 or newer
Windows 10 has a Linux env without systemd
https://twitter.com/karinjiri/status/760686492490592256
Lurkers on mailing list
IBM XLC produces warnings instead of errors resulting in many autoconf
tests passing untentionally
Changes upcoming on OpenBSD 6.0
New/extended platforms: vax: removed
Fuzzing bpfjit with AFL on NetBSD
Corporate hierarcy and pointing out erorrs in the CTO's code
Automatic kickback response to a change request
setlocale() & and the LC_* variables, where's the documentation?
Terse and vague documentation on the opengroup site
Voluntary & involuntary context switching
Optimising for the reduction of involuntary context switching but ending
up with a process which takes far longer everywhere & only reduces
context switching on modern systems
Systems architecture and the impact on performance eg excessively high
involuntary context switches on a PI when doing disk I/O on SD card
Methods for examining memory layout
NetBSD W^X cleanup https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CoyXhGIWcAAbHNc.jpg:orig
Performance issues with AVX may have been addressed in Skylake
Intel has a lot of legacy
Multithreaded garbage collectors are hard
testing changes related to disk i/o and forgetting that ZFS prefetches
if it detects sequential reads
Holding a BSD hack day ala London.PM
Detrimental hierarcy
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/cnn_asks_if_koreas_hierarchical_culture_caused_crash/
Excessive drinking and corporate culture eg initiations
Natural tendency to establish structures & hierarchy before something
has even set in motion
That time there was a 16 person turnout at the Cambridge meeting
Cambridge life vs London life
London Polution
GCC vs clang
Silly dependencies - system installed with GCC 4.9 on Debian, installing
the Linux kernel sources automatically tries to downgrade the compiler
to GCC 4.8
The ability to generalise about dependencies in a packaging system eg I
need a editor
Explicing depencies on conflicting variants of a package to the
detriment of the user, resorting to mixing packages & ports as a workaround
OS X is painful
Yubikey support in the BSDs
Yubikey fido - the dongle that's dongled to your browser (chrome or FF)
login_yubikey(8) in OpenBSD