I am having to correct, with alarming regularity, confusion regarding the endianness of modern PowerPC and POWER chips. This article is going to answer a lot of those questions, with facts and citations. What endianness are modern PowerPC / POWER CPUs, including POWER9?Fact: All POWER Architecture processors, with the exception of the POWER4 and POWER5,… Continue reading Clearing confusion regarding modern PowerPC endianness
Tag: computers
Status update for Firefox on PowerPC / big endian
(This post is probably not interesting to non-technical observers. Rest assured, I'm still working quite hard on porting Firefox to PowerPC when I have the chance.) I've just pulled the latest Firefox code (from mozilla-central) and have fully rebuilt Firefox with the latest code. First, the good news: JS-API tests are still 100% passing. XPC… Continue reading Status update for Firefox on PowerPC / big endian
Big Endian Firefox: Now with more compositing
I'm currently in the process of trying to bring up the PowerPC platform as a fully supported architecture in Firefox. I've already implemented better support for XPCOM / JS interfacing, and fixed a crash in the JavaScript interpreter. My next challenge is fixing graphical issues, which is proving to be more of a challenge than… Continue reading Big Endian Firefox: Now with more compositing
Ridiculous unusable download URLs for open source projects
I told myself (and everyone I know) that I wouldn't write another blog post until I moved the blog off Google Blogger, but I can't stay silent on this issue. UPower, the open source power management software used on Linux (and I believe the *BSD family), has recently changed their download URLs. As the lead… Continue reading Ridiculous unusable download URLs for open source projects
Exposing The Wayland Lie
Since a growing number of people have been asking me "when" Wayland will be fully supported on Adélie, I felt like I should clear up all the lies that Wayland's development have apparently made in to folklore. 1. "Wayland can't be keylogged, unlike X11." Apparently, some people think that X11 is insecure because it allows… Continue reading Exposing The Wayland Lie
Fixing the laptop I broke
Using assembly language to fix a Linux computer with a broken libc.… Continue reading Fixing the laptop I broke
Configuring a more secure password hash for OpenLDAP
While working on the Galapagos infrastructure, we ran in to an interesting issue: using passwd(1) as an LDAP user would cause it to add another password instead of modifying it. Setting up the slapo-ppolicy(5) overlay then caused passwd(1) to then fail with: password change failed: Password policy only allows one password value passwd: Authentication token… Continue reading Configuring a more secure password hash for OpenLDAP
