Oh god.
People really need to come up with crazy shit all the time ?

We invent ARM. Then people decide to do Device trees instead of what we had on x86.
We get ARM64 and it becomes the standart.

And now comes the point where it all fucks up.
OEMs start creating 1 DT file for each node. Now they include them all together.
That we can live with. Sorta EZ to follow.

But nooooo thats not enough. We have to be able to change device trees from bootloader.

So we get fucking device tree overlays.
And now you get overlays that overlays another overlay that overlays the base DT. WHAT THE
FUCK. Why. And you get multiple of such cases

Dont get me wrong. Overlays are cool and useful when used right. AKA for what they were made for. Fixing issues in DT. Not adding stuff over working DT. NO.

And ofc in the end you have those overlays compiled into multiple DTBOs that apply over the DTB.

Welcome to ARM64 linux kernel development.

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

Visual Studio 2022 compiles our internal c++ cmake project as a mix of x86 and x86_64 binaries, then fails to link.

VS 2019 correctly compiles everything as x86_64.

No idea why. And, obviously, it's not a documented problem.

First "computer" : Electronika BK. Had some fun with table software and some basic

first X86 : Intel 80286 with wooping 1MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive.

First fun experiance :

Me : "I'm gonna clean folders"
Me : "What are these files on the c: ? I'll move them into a folder"
(Youknow like io.sys, autoexec.bat)
Reboots :
Computer : "Please insert a boot drive"
Me : "The what now?"
Needed some help to fix it.
At least I learnt how boot loader works and wrote my own small thingy in asm

I have one Windows and one Apple M1 computer. Our project runs old docker containers and can't upgrade easily. I decided to run the x86 versions of containers on there and use them from my network. Corporate Windows has port blocking so I decided to install linux to a usb drive. I loaded a live install distro and installed it to a second USB drive.
The internal nvme laptop drive somehow had its partition table wiped along the way. I can see files on there in a partition restore tool but alas it isn't becoming bootable again from uefi after doing partition table restore. 😭

Just found out a LOCK CMPXCHG has about the same latency as a simple DIV...

my life was a lie

I suppose the modern equivalent to waiting around code compiling is building the bloody Docker images. Vastly exacerbated by the requirement of an X86 image on ARM hardware.

FML 🙃