These are a couple of interesting technical videos from the Linux Conference in New Zealand (it is posted with an Australia linuxconf.au though). Folks do interesting things there… There was one by Pottering telling us all why we were stupid for not rushing to embrace SystemD as it is gods gift… I’m not including that one here. Mostly it just reinforced my belief that he’s a bit clueless about why The Unix Way (do one thing and do it well) matters and is critically important for things like the Init Process. There was another video about “runit” that I liked that also isn’t going here, because I’ve lost the link to it… but I might add it later.
22 minutes on using a Database as your Linux File System. Yes, really. This guy directly installs a database over raw disks, then runs a linux on top of it as the file system. (I told you folks do interesting things ;-) It isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds; but it is kinda crazy ;-)
43 minutes exploring the details of doing computing using the Graphics Cores on different machines. It is still a bit of a proprietary minefield with various vendors not playing well with others. So things like CUDA is a language that only runs on Nvidia cores, because it is made by Nvidia… Does a good job of laying out the various options and making it clearer why so many things are hard to do or run poorly; especially on an Arm chip where the video / GPU core is not one of the preferred Intel Box ones. Then gives a bit of a road map out of that jungle “going forward”…
That last one is actually useful for me. It’s the space I’m soft of poking at with my Pi Stack Of SBCs…
Then 20 minutes on building the Linux Kernel using a different compiler, the Clang compiler (variously pronounced “C-Lang” or “clang” depending on the person). He gets a slightly larger kernel with a slightly longer compile time, so it wasn’t a win for his project of making a smaller kernel (for some dinky target machine); but the experience is an interesting one. Clang supposedly has better “security” features, but I’m unfamiliar with it. IIRC there’s a distribution or two built using Clang/LLVM instead of gcc. Void maybe? Nope. Maybe it was just the musl libraries…
Clang should work but Linux also has the “GNUisms” so deep there [is] a big project called LLVMlinux to correct it
So likely the kernel is still a gcc thing and only the rest of things are built with Clang. In any case, this guy got it to compile, but with a few issues that he talks about.
Now you know what I do in the morning with my first “wake up” coffee ;-) Watch videos about strange and difficult things other folks are doing as motivation that what I’m trying to do isn’t really all that hard in comparison ;-)
Musings from the Chiefio 
I know that systemd was a huge jump and many over reaches. But a big roll out can be tapered back as defects are found. If the flavors are supporting it and the install, makes, configs are getting there. I am not too worried. I find it exciting that more people are working on Darwin and mac ports as it seems to me one can work inside the native space of os x and use a flavor of linux natively. Can’t trust apple not to wreck it.
What bothers me is there have been many functional almost ready for prime time products that died a slow death becuase more time was spent on flavors rather than development within. one being majordomo, the other being mail systems.
But still, that aside, i am going to spend presidents weekend discovering Zigbee.
Next Saturday, 23 Feb, seems to be the big day in the Venezuela story.
I wonder if Cuba will extract its folks this week? I’m guessing that’s the reason for the delay.
Mis-file that comment?
The comment about using a DB for the linux filesystem reminds me of IBM System 36, 38 and AS400, which used the newfangled Relational DB.