LLVM 8.0 release highlight (ha): LLDB now has syntax highlighting!
the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now runs Weston!
Another weird LLVM mystery solved!
and the reason it all worked fine with bfd and gold is that these linkers SILENTLY convert .ctors to .init_array. For PERFORMANCE REASONS.
It's almost 2019, so using a SATA SSD as the boot drive for your main development OS is not cool anymore… and I was running out of space on this 128gb one, so I bought an NVMe drive to replace it. Yay.
But the fun part was that my 10G network card stopped working. Moving the card into the middle slot (from the bottom one) fixed it. Reported a FreeBSD bug.
The weirdest discovery of the day though was that MSI mainboards persist the "above 4G" PCIe setting across CMOS clears. What in the actual heck. This is the setting that breaks display output on most GPUs (funnily enough, mine did display non-EFI things such as the network card's boot prompt and the glitchy way FreeBSD displays the console when booting on UEFI with the EFI framebuffer disabled). It's a setting you very much need to clear.
Finally got around to actually trying out ZeroTier. It's pretty awesome!
But other than that… the simplicity is lovely. No screwing around with config files, restarts and whatnot. Just a very small & easy set of admin commands. And automatic IP address assignment (especially 6PLANE) is amazing.
An SPI flash chip module arrived in the mail today. I ordered that for replicating this basically. To (network) boot the Orange Pi PC without microSD.
For 0.5 dollars per hour (or currently 0.1/hr if you reserve for 24h?) on packet.net you can get access to a dedicated dual-socket Cavium ThunderX server with 128GB RAM and a 250GB SSD. I took it for a few hours and now lang/crystal, lang/mono and some other ports work on aarch64.
Ironically, these two builds have involved long single-threaded compile processes. In the mono case, parallelism had to be disabled for C# compilation to work around a concurrency bug.
The web standards process is a weird thing. Something as complicated and incredible as CSS Grid is already shipping everywhere… while something as mundane and simple as registering a website as a share target has been in the bikeshedding stage for two years already.