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keithp.com
Personal blog · keithp.com/blogssystemshardwareprogramming
keithp.com is a personal blog at keithp.com about systems, hardware and programming. Since 2008, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “Repository Formats Matter”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 36 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his posts on X Window System and Linux graphics history, the 'Repository Formats Matter' essay on version control, and his embedded C library and Snek language projects.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says his 'Repository Formats Matter' post "nicely captures" why repository format matters more than git's user interface.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 36 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Repository Formats Matter4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-07-29
- /blogs/DRM-lease/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-25
- Cleaning up X server warnings3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-15
- Picolibc: C Libraries for Smaller Embedded Systems3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-14
- /x-ideas/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-06-29
- Repository Formats Matter (2007)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-16
- /~keithp/porterduff/p253-porter.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-07
- The Snek Programming Language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-26
- Window-scaling2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-27
- Multi-Stream Transport 4k Monitors and X2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-18
What Hacker News says?
Well, I am sorry to have to disagree on this. This is no rocket science, and the software support isn't that different from any standard monitor/gamepad combo. That's for the architecture, at least. Of course, latency requirements are higher. But the differences stops here. Face it, today's VR headsets simply are monitors that you wear on your face (Head Mounted Displays). Anyone thinking otherwise is simply lying t…
Comment linking /blogs/DRM-lease/
on “All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate”Submitted Reviving Old X Code as a story · 247 points
HN discussion> What do you mean by "pixel perfect frames"? Wayland enthusiasts usually use "pixel-perfect frames" to mean lack of tearing -- what happens when the framebuffer is changed in the middle of the "electron beam's" scan down the display and you get half of one image and half of another. Eliminating tearing generally means forcing vsync, which means your framerate is capped at 60fps, and a few milliseconds of input late…
Comment linking /x-ideas/x-security/
on “Debian 10 “Buster” Released”Submitted Fun with -fsanitize=undefined and Picolibc as a story · 118 points
HN discussion> Mercurial feels like it should be the winner. The commands are more uniform and predictable. Keith Packard's "Repository Formats Matter" post nicely captures how meaningless it is to focus on this sort of thing in the long term: https://keithp.com/blogs/Repository_Formats_Matter/ I.e. yes Git has some UI issues, but those are fixable, whereas e.g. Subversion's UI was way better than Git in the early days, but its…
Comment linking /blogs/Repository_Formats_Matter/
on “Oh shit, git (2016)”Submitted Picolibc – Libc for Embedded Systems as a story · 118 points
HN discussionCairo wasn't the library behind the X11 drawing API, it was originally the Xr rendering extension, that was an alternative to the original X11 drawing API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) >The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho. You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in…
Comment linking /~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/
on “The death watch for the X Window System has probably started”Submitted Goodbye-Barnes-and-Noble as a story · 106 points
HN discussionCurrent Xorg has Glamor, using OpenGL to accelerate the 2D ops of X11. There is also Zink, OpenGL-over-Vulkan for the rare case of Vulkan without native OpenGL. OTOH, there are people willing to add support for old hardware that probably can't run Vulkan, or even OpenGL, and sometimes they manage to upstream that code. With your "bsder" nick, the following example seems relevant. https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_…
Comment linking /x-ideas/
on “Debian KDE: Right Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024”Submitted Cleaning up X server warnings as a story · 45 points
HN discussionInterestingly, the old maintainer (Keith Packard) has a fairly recent (2018) list of improvement ideas for Xorg: https://keithp.com/x-ideas/
Comment linking /x-ideas/
on “Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly””Submitted Architecture of HP's “The Machine” as a story · 38 points
HN discussionYes, I agree: Cairo is "really good stuff" as Jim Gettys so modestly puts it! It's one of the best things to come out of X-Windows and the original Xr extension. ("The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho.") Finally (and for a long time now) it's an independent library, no longer tied into the X server and Xr extension, and there are a lot of wrappers for it, bro…
Comment linking /~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/
on “Ancient X11 scaling technology”Submitted Calypso: CalDAV/CardDAV server using Git to retain database history as a story · 33 points
HN discussionX has had its OpenGL extension available since 1992. Your argument is like saying "Windows 1.0 came out before Direct X even existed, so of course you can't play modern games on Windows 10". As new things came out, they added support for it. Compositors are an optional component. I have never run one myself since they don't add anything of value. So any time someone says "the X server only talks to the compositor" I…
Comment linking /blogs/dri3_extension/
on “How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)”Submitted Newlib-nano – Embedded C library for smaller systems as a story · 28 points
HN discussion> KDE splits out selected text, and ctrl+c text, into separate clipboards, allowing for some really good workflows. Just for completeness & correctness: that's an X11 feature, not related to KDE, and predates KDE by several years. I can't easily find the history of it, but this Keith Packard paper[0] on it is dated 1990 so it's necessarily older than that… [0] http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/selection.ps (pg. 5, "4.…
Comment linking /~keithp/talks/selection.ps
on “Is there a maximum size for Windows clipboard data?”Submitted Notmuch: command-line email search and tagging as a story · 15 points
HN discussionIn the case of Xorg, if they had warnings enabled, it was one warning among pages and pages of them. Recently though, they cleaned it up, 1.16 and onward should compile without warnings[0]. [0] http://keithp.com/blogs/xserver-warnings/
Comment linking /blogs/xserver-warnings/
on “A brief history of one line fixes”Submitted Keith Packard: The Machine Architecture as a story · 7 points
HN discussionwith the X bug, building X has always triggered tons of warnings, it's easy to see why they're overlooked http://keithp.com/blogs/xserver-warnings/
Comment linking /blogs/xserver-warnings/
on “A brief history of one line fixes”Submitted The Snek Programming Language as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSomewhat relatedly, there exists a Python-like language for when you only have a few kb of memory, and can’t even run MicroPython. It’s called “Snek”: https://keithp.com/snek/
Comment linking /snek/
on “Smoltcp: A small TCP/IP stack in Rust”Submitted Newt: A Tiny Embeddable Python Subset as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe issue without "Direct Mode" is latency, as your link says. You need to bypass both the browser compositor and the system compositor. On Linux, most compositors will implement something like Direct Mode (compositor bypass) when you go fullscreen, but it's a bit hit and miss with multimonitor setups. It might fly as a stopgap, though. Here's the tracking bug for WebVR on Linux, if you want to follow progress: http…
Comment linking /blogs/DRM-lease/
on “Firefox 55: WebVR and more”Submitted Finding a Libc for tiny embedded ARM systems as a story · 3 points
HN discussionExactly! Make the format simple and obvious enough to be applicable for a wide range of purposes. Because humility. http://keithp.com/blogs/Repository_Formats_Matter/ On-the-wire formats matter, on-disk formats matter.
Comment linking /blogs/Repository_Formats_Matter/
on “Rob Pike's Rules of Programming”Submitted AltOS-Lisp as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's just really hard for people to see beyond the present. Innovators in one cycle are often blind to the opportunities in the next. I see it in a couple of my successful friends that built their own companies on the web and mobile when it comes to crypto. I'm reminded of the quote about the radio: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”…
Comment linking /blog/Repository_Formats_Matter/
on “Beyond the Bitcoin bubble”Submitted ChaosKey v1.0 Released – USB Attached True Random Number Generator as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
