Monthly Archive:: February 2024

SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: to store billions of files!, to serve the files fast! SeaweedFS started as an Object Store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages volumes on volume servers, and these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (O(1), usually just one disk read operation). There is only 40 bytes of disk storage overhead for each file’s metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk reads that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases. ↫ SeaweedFS’s GitHub page It’s Apache-licensed and the code is, as usual, on GitHub.

The proposed activity is to evaluate the usage of Rust programming language in space applications, by prototyping an RTOS targeting ARM Cortex-M7 SAMV71 microcontroller together with the required BSP (Board Support Package) and a Demonstration Application. Rust safety features and its growing usage make this programming language a viable option in the space sector. It is proposed to first develop a lightweight real time operating system providing a minimal set of capabilities required for development of flight application software. This system will provide an executor, tasklets mechanisms and BSP for SAMV71. The design of the system will be guided to support potential future qualification activities. Although the project is a study, ECSS software development practices will be used to facilitate potential application in ESA projects. The practical feedback from ECSS application in Rust projects will be reported. In the second part of the activity, a small demonstration application software will be developed, providing a minimal feature-set representative of a CubeSat class project – UART communication, mode management and sensor handling. This application will showcase the viability of the developed RTOS and provide input to a Lessons Learned report, describing the encountered issues, potential problem and improvement areas, usage recommendations and proposed way forward. ↫ The European Space Agency Rust, but in space. The code’s on GitHub.

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” ↫ Jon Porter at The Verge Google Search continues to become ever more useless.

The Redox project has published an overview of the progress made in January, and it’s a long list. Redox now supports the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a few of System76’s Cosmic Desktop applications now run on Redox, several more Linux applications haven been ported (most notably for me, nano, my CLI text editor of choice), and much more. The most important change is an overhaul of how Redox handles resource paths: Redox has a microkernel core, with drivers and other resource providers running as tasks and providing “schemes”. A scheme is the name of a resource provider, and until now, resources have been accessed using URI/URL format. For example, files would be accessed as file:path/to/my_file, and a TCP connection would be accessed as tcp:127.0.0.1. This format, while forward-looking, has not been very backwards-compatible. In order to simplify our efforts to port Linux software to Redox, we have decided to change our resource path format to the Linux-compatible /scheme/scheme_name/path/to/resource. Paths that do not begin with /scheme will be assumed to refer to the file scheme, so /path/to/my_file is treated by the system as /scheme/file/path/to/my_file, but the application will only see the /path/to/my_file portion. Using this format, normal paths now look just like Linux paths, while drivers and other resources can still be addressed without breaking software. ↫ Ron Williams The change is an ongoing process, so you might encounter some issues related to it in the coming time.

The ReactOS project is working on a new graphical installer to replace the older, text-mode one. In the first blog post about this effort, from December 2023, developer hbelusca details their work on setupapi, the module that enables “reading and processing INF files, moving/copying files from an installation source media to a target, supporting also extraction from compressed .CAB cabinet files”, as well as device installation functions. The second post dives into partitioning during installation, which involves a lot of very delicate work, from partitioning to installing the bootloader, and from copying files to modifying the registry. On top of that, this needs a GUI, and preferably one that’s better and more versatile than the well-known blue text-mode setup we all know from old versions of Windows. The new GUI presents more options, allows for bootloader settings, and, of course, partitioning in a non-destructive way before committing. In addition, while the blue text-mode setup can only go forward, the new GUI is bidirectional. The third and final post dives into testing all this work and fixing bugs. The post goes into great detail describing a number of bugs and their fixes, and is well worth a read, too.

Microsoft is testing native Sudo command support for Windows 11. The support for native “Sudo” command was spotted in a leaked Windows Server preview build, accidentally published to the Windows Update servers over the weekend. ↫ Mayank Parmar It’s kind of wild that something like sudo doesn’t exist in Windows.

Around late 1986, Sega released the “Sega AI Computer”. This is one of Sega’s least well known and rarest systems. Not much is known about this system apart from a small amount of information in Japanese and American flyers and press articles. The information we have is still piecemeal and may be partly inaccurate. Today we are making public, for the first time: all system roms extracted from the Sega AI Computer, data dumps from 26 my-cards and 14 tapes, many scans and photographs, and in collaboration with MAME developers, an early working MAME driver allowing this computer to be emulated. ↫ SMS Power! Incredible. Usually stuff like this is relegated to a YouTube video, with potential archival efforts pushed to the background since it’s boring and won’t get any views. This is an amazing effort.