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SkillsJava, Android, C++, Bash, Python, JS
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Joined devRant on 3/5/2017
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Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):
- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)
- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)
- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)
- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched
- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)
- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)
- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)
- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)
- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable
- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)
We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim
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Okay, this is a rather technical rant and I am sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )
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Hey everyone,
First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):
- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)
Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).
We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:
- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.
- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.
- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.
- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.
- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.
There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.
We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.
2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.
Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim
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