FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yes and no. A lot of the projects I work on the majority of the engineers are funded by companies which have very real commercial drivers to do so. However the fact the code itself is free (as in freedom) means that everyone benefits from the commons and as a result interesting contributions come up which aren’t on the commercial roadmap. Look at git, a source control system Linus built because he needed something to maintain Linux in and he didn’t like any of the alternatives. It solved his itch but is now the basis for a large industry of code forges with git at their heart.

    While we have roadmaps for features we want they still don’t get merged until they are ready and acceptable to the upstream which makes for much more sustainable projects in the long run.

    Interestingly while we have had academic contributions there are a lot more research projects that use the public code as a base but the work is never upstreamed because the focus is on getting the paper/thesis done. Code can work and prove the thing they investigating but still need significant effort to get it merged.






  • Alex@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlcheckmate
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    3 months ago

    There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

    The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.





  • I work for a company that makes money supporting FLOSS. Our members pay fairly hefty membership fees because they have a vested interest in their chips being well supported by Linux and the wider ecosystem. That money funds common projects they all benefit from all well as numerous maintainers in projects keeping those projects ticking.

    The engineers on the project I mostly work on are predominantly paid to work on it. We value our hobbyist itch scratchers (~10% off contributors) but it’s commercial money that keeps those patches reviewed and flowing.




  • QEMU is always going to focus on emulation fidelity first and there are few shortcuts. With floating point the differences aren’t generally in the numbers but in how the NaNs and other edge cases are handled. If you want to execute FP heavy code you should be cross compiling anyway.





  • Pretty much. From v8.0 onwards all the extra features are indicated by id flags. Stuff that is relevant to kernel mode will generally be automatically handled by the kernel patching itself on booting up and in user space some libraries will select appropriately accelerated functions when the ISA extensions are probed. There are a bunch off advisory instructions encoded in the hint space that will be effectively NOPs on older hardware but will enhance execution if run on newer hardware.

    If you want to play with newer instructions have a look at QEMUs “max” CPU.