2026-09-13 00:40:03 <crc         > 
ACTION remembers spending several frustrating months working on a driver for some brother label printers (mainly troublesome due to incorrect documentation on the printers)

2026-09-13 18:16:38 <xentrac     > veltas: true, yes, he could be delusional, but the 1000-MIPS average and the presence of a multiply-step instruction seem like fairly straightforward things for others to verify, and there probably are inherently non-parallelizable problems that would perform worse on such small cores
2026-09-13 18:17:05 <xentrac     > you don't have to do video generation on the chip; dual-core 1.8GHz Atoms don't
2026-09-13 18:18:22 <xentrac     > I think the more likely answer is that the chip, like a pile of sand, really does have that performance potential, but is too hard to program
2026-09-13 18:19:19 <xentrac     > an order of magnitude more performance potential from embedded multipliers (maybe only, say, 36 of them, rather than one per core) might have made the difference
2026-09-13 18:34:39 <xentrac     > I don't think bitbanging on an asynchronous processor would be a good way to generate a video signal anyway
2026-09-13 18:36:30 <xentrac     > not unless you connected an external crystal and implemented a PLL
2026-09-13 19:25:59 <veltas      > Just finally set up zram on my laptop with 2GB of RAM... with a really aggressive policy, zstd compression.  It's crazy, it's like I've added another 2GB of RAM
2026-09-13 19:26:31 <veltas      > Should have done this ages ago
2026-09-13 19:33:51 <xentrac     > what's the zram/zswap tradeoff?
2026-09-13 19:34:07 <xentrac     > (I understand zswap is an alternative to zram)
2026-09-13 20:30:34 <veltas      > I don't know honestly xentrac, I struggled to even get zram configured
2026-09-13 20:30:51 <veltas      > Took me all day (well like 1 hour, church/kids kept me occupied the rest of day)
2026-09-13 20:31:16 <veltas      > I mean turning it on was fine, but I tried stress-testing it and it seemed to be essentially useless
2026-09-13 20:31:42 <veltas      > Turned out I had tuned swappiness all the way down... I guess because my HDD is quite slow and previously I only had one kind of 'swap'
2026-09-13 20:33:26 <veltas      > I threw in towel and went to go ask ChatGPT for help, wasn't happy about it
2026-09-13 20:33:39 <veltas      > I guess it makes sense though given how my weekend's gone and lack of time
2026-09-13 20:55:00 <veltas      > > /dev/zram0 zstd          1.4G  1.4G 292.3M 306.2M       2 [SWAP]
2026-09-13 20:55:17 <veltas      > Those numbers being size, data, compressed, total
2026-09-13 20:56:07 <veltas      > So 306MB RAM used for 1.4GB of data, I basically downloaded 1.1GB of extra RAM
2026-09-13 21:03:12 <xentrac     > yeah, the LLMs are pretty good at that kind of advice
2026-09-13 21:05:57 <veltas      > ChatGPT thinks I should be using zram over zswap for my laptop, but I don't understand its explanation
2026-09-13 21:10:43 <veltas      > I am getting impression zswap is fine if you've got a very fast storage device
2026-09-13 22:01:00 <xentrac     > oh, you can zswap to a ramdisk
2026-09-13 22:04:40 <xentrac     > but I meant for the advice about how to set it up, rather than the advice about what was better
2026-09-13 22:13:25 <veltas      > Sorry yes I got that, I was just rambling