Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I wrote and maintained a lot of sysvinit scripts and I fucking hated them. I wrote Upstart scripts and I fucking hated them. I wrote OpenRC scripts and I fucking hated them. Any init system that relies on one of the worst languages in common use nowadays can fuck right off. Systemd units are well documented, consistent, and reliable.

    From my 30 seconds of looking, I actually like nitro a bit more than OpenRC or Upstart. It does seem like it’d struggle with daemons the way sysvinit scripts used to. Like, you have to write a process supervisor to track when your daemonized process dies so that it can then die and tell nitro (which is, ofc, a process supervisor), and it looks like the logging might be trickier in that case too. I fucking hate services that background themselves, but they do exist and systemd does a great job at handling those. It also doesn’t do any form of dependency management AFAICT, which is a more serious flaw.

    Nitro seems like a good option for some use cases (although I cannot conceive why you’d want to run a service manager in a container when docker and k8s have robust service management built into them), but it’s never touching the disk on any of the tens of thousands of boxes I help administrate. systemd is just too good.




  • Do you have any sources for the 10x memory thing? I’ve seen people who have made memory usage claims, but I haven’t seen benchmarks demonstrating this.

    EDIT: glibc-based images wouldn’t be using service managers either. PID 1 is your application.

    EDIT: In response to this:

    There’s a reason a huge portion of docker images are alpine-based.

    After months of research, my company pushed thousands and thousands of containers away from alpine for operational and performance reasons. You can get small images using glibc-based distros. Just look at chainguard if you want an example. We saved money (many many dollars a month) and had fewer tickets once we finished banning alpine containers. I haven’t seen a compelling reason to switch back, and I just don’t see much to recommend Alpine outside of embedded systems where disk space is actually a problem. I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong for using it, but my experience has basically been a series of events telling me to avoid it. Also, I fucking hate the person that decided it wasn’t going to do search domains properly or DNS over TCP.


  • Debian is superior for server tasks. musl is designed to optimize for smaller binaries on disk. Memory is a secondary goal, and cpu time is a non-goal. musl isn’t meant to be fast, it’s meant to be small and easily embedded. Those are great things if you need to run in a network/disk constrained environment, but for a server? Why waste CPU cycles using a libc that is, by design, less time efficient?

    EDIT: I had to fight this fight at my job. We had hundreds of thousands of Alpine containers running, and switching them to glibc-based containers resulted in quantifiable cloud spend savings. I’m not saying musl (or alpine) is bad, just that you have horses for courses.


  • Is it? I thought the thing that musl optimized for was disk usage, not memory usage or CPU time. It’s been my experience that alpine containers are worse than their glibc counterparts because glibc is damn good. It’s definitely faster in many cases. I think this is fixed now, but I remember when musl made the python interpreter run like 50-100x slower.

    EDIT: musl is good at what it tries to be good at. It’s not trying to be the fastest, it’s trying to be small on disk or over the network.




  • True! I just wonder how much energy they’d realistically be able to store for a given amount of resources. Like, does this have the same issues as Lifted Weight Storage? Where the energy density just doesn’t really make sense once you get right down to it. I don’t know the relevant math to determine how much water and at what pressures might be required to scale this up to the 500MWh/1GWh range. It might be perfectly fine.

    EDIT: fuck man I’m not writing well today. edited to make me sound like less of a cretin










  • I dunno, I’d slow your roll on that. Hanlon’s razor came to notoriety in the field of computer science for a reason. I’ve done software dev professionally for over ten years now and you wouldn’t believe the stupid shit I’ve seen people write. The only thing that sucks more than a computer is the human writing software for it.

    For those unfamiliar, here’s Hanlon’s razor:

    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

    EDIT: After a quick look at the CVEs, this definitely sounds like a big ol’ fuckup. It sounds like there might be some unsafe defaults in polkit as well?

    EDIT: Here’s the report from the actual researchers which is MUCH more cogent than OP’s article: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/06/17/4

    It’s chaining two separate oopsies together. This overview on GitHub also provides more details about the libblockdev side of things: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mpgj-hch9-5rvx

    Specifically, this section:

    However, a local attacker can create a specially crafted XFS image containing a SUID-root shell, then trick udisks into resizing it. This mounts their malicious filesystem with root privileges, allowing them to execute their SUID-root shell and gain complete control of the system.

    That really doesn’t sound like something intentional to me. That sounds like a HUGE oopsy-woopsy fucky-wucky, to get technical about it.


  • For people like me who didn’t know what this was:

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    edit: honestly, that’s a shitty description. This one seems a bit better:

    Stremio is a modern media center that gives you the freedom to watch everything you want.