The Joe Lowe Project

All work and no play makes Joe a dull boy.

If you have reached this site looking for turtles, you are going to be disappointed.


2015.01.27

OSX (and Windows) mouse acceleration

One of the first things I do when setting up a new Windows installation is to go into the control panel and disable enhanced pointer precision. Funny how a feature that makes mouse pointer motion less deterministic was labeled as "enhancing precision".

As much as I dislike mouse acceleration in Windows, the acceleration algorithm used in Windows is wonderful in comparison to the tarpit algorithm in OSX. Unfortunately for me, the Apple UX guys did not want to confuse me with multiple controls in the mouse preferences panel.

The decision by whoever at Apple to force-feed mouse acceleration to their users is bizarre. Many professionals spend much of their time using applications on Macs with primarily mouse based user interfaces. The ability to quickly move the mouse pointer across screen _and_ precisely hit a target is key to productive use of the system. The OSX acceleration algorithm makes it easy to get the pointer from one side of the screen to the other, but it ends up taking much longer to actually hit a a target that is not on the edge of the screen. You can find arguments about this online, mostly concerning competitive gaming, but the effect of mouse acceleration on productivity is just as real as the effect on competitive gaming. It is easy for anyone to non-subjectively prove this, just try playing a minesweeper clone on OSX.

After some digging I did eventually figure out how to disable mouse acceleration on OSX. The following shell script will do the trick, though you do need to logout/login for it to take effect, and you need to avoid going into mouse preferences or the changes will be lost.

#!/bin/sh
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

Many other complainers about OSX mouse acceleration are not looking to turn acceleration off, but instead want a Windows-like acceleration curve. The fix I found will not help with that. But maybe they should try playing some minesweeper on Windows with acceleration on and off before they spend too much energy trying to mimic Windows mouse acceleration on OSX.

Joe L.

2014.07.12

Linux kernel module signing is retarded

I have been digging around to figure out what I need to do regarding kernel module signing and safe boot with my kernel modules on Linux. Looks like things in this area have settled down now and we have a working solution most distros will pick up, shim+MOK (machine owner keys).

The problem with the MOK mechanism is that except for Redhat systems (maybe SUSE) 3rd party kernel modules must at least be partially compiled on the end-user system. This means the private key used to sign the kernel module must exist at least temporarily on the end-user system. Anytime you implement public key encryption and your solution private key is not kept secret, you are doing something wrong. Signing kernel modules built on the end-user system is pointless and retarded, no argument necessary.

For Redhat systems, I might eventually end up signing prebuilt kernel modules using my organization private key. For users of every other distro the course of action is clear: if a user wants to run my software then he/she will have to disable secure boot.

There is no feasible way to improve the situation for 3rd party developers. The Linux kernel devs will never implement a stable kernel ABI to allow general binary kernel module distribution, and if kernel modules are built on the end-user system then they can not be signed using a vendor private key.

And no, getting my kernel modules into the kernel source tree is not a solution. There has been a lot of really good engineering that the established kernel devs would not take into the kernel tree, and there is plenty of shoddy engineering they definately should not take. But regardless, the user should always have the right to choose what software they want to run on their systems. Kernel features and distro choices that arbitrarily limit user freedoms are crossing a line.

Joe L.

2014.07.10

Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 released

I do not pay much mind to new Linux distro releases, but RHEL requires a little extra attention on my part.

My primary solution to supporting my kernel module based projects on linux is to compile on the users system, but Redhat does not provide long term archives of the needed kernel-devel packages for all of their kernel updates. So, I prebuild binary kernel modules just for the Redhat based distros. This has worked pretty well so far, as Redhat seems to try pretty hard to avoid ABI compatibility breaks in their kernel updates within a given major version.

This week I went through the headache of putting together a clean RHEL 7 kernel source package for use in my Ptlinsdk toolchain. I can now pump out RHEL 5,6, and 7 prebuilt kernel modules with my normal buld process, from either a mac or linux build system.

Windows Mountpoint/Junction to network volumes

I have been planning on phasing out the "virtual mount point" feature in my file system tech for some time now. This feature served its purpose and still functions, but with more of Windows and 3rd party apps now mountpoint and symlink aware, it causes more compat issues than in prevents.

The plan was to switch to using real NTFS mountpoints. Unfortunately this plan has run into trouble. After a day screwing with things trying to get this to work, a little debugging work in the kernel reveals that the lack of support for mountpoints to network volumes is a bit more enforced than I had hoped. The IO manager is more involved with mountpoint processing than with other types of reparse points, and explicitly checks that the target device is a local file system.

For various technical reasons, my file system presents to the system as a network file system, so cannot be the target of an NTFS mount point. I already have a work-around, but I was not able to get rid of as much of the old virtual mountpoint logic as I had hoped.

Itching for that 4k monitor

Waiting to see how the Westinghouse 4k 39-55 inch monitors look and price. They have been teasing about releasing these since first of the year, but other than trade show press releases there is nothing yet. I plan to hold out for something that can do 60hz native without the dual display crap the current monitors do, and do 120hz at 1080p for games.

Joe L.

Windows "Keyed" Events, would have been nice...

2013.10.16

Way back in Windows XP, MS introduced a new synchronization primitive called "keyed events". These were exposed through the undocumented native system calls NtCreateKeyedEvent, NtOpenKeyedEvent, NtReleaseKeyedEvent, and NtWaitForKeyedEvent. Keyed events were then used by MS to implement (or reimplement) higher level win32 synchronization primtives.

When I dropped support for Win2K some time back, I switched the implementation of some of my own portable synchronization primitives to use keyed events on Windows. This eliminated some potential scalability issues and generally simplified things. It allows sleeping and later waking a thread with a total of 2 kernel mode transitions, nice.

Well, things are rarely simple. I am now seeing deadlocks at process exit in one of my projects. The issue is that NtReleaseKeyedEvent gets stuck in the kernel if the thread that called NtWaitForKeyedEvent was terminated. A quick internet search turns up this hit:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2582203

It seems that the keyed event implementation was not well tested in combination with thread termination.

Many win32 gurus will point out that you should not terminate threads, so this issue is the developers fault and not a fault of the keyed event implementation. That conclusion is naive. Terminating threads needs to be dealt with in Windows at least for two reasons:

  1. The win32 TerminateProcess implementation implicitly terminates threads. When building simple single binary applications it is trivial to make sure your threads are finished before TerminateProcess is called by the runtime, but when building DLLs for use by 3rd party client applications or modules, things are not as simple.
  2. Some Windows facilities (eg. ReadFile() and WriteFile() to console handles) have a tendency to get stuck and prevent process exit, causing problems even in relatively simple applications.

For better or worse, thread termination is something that at least needs to be dealt with at process exit time, a time when the resource leak issues associated with thread termination are irrelevent.

(Insert tirade here about loader-lock, DLL TLS issues, user-mode win32 "handles", TerminateProcess implementation, and about Microsofts inability to fix broken designs.)

The Windows CRITICAL_SECTION and SRW implementations uses keyed events and are supposed to handle thread termination, so there are work-arounds. But, if you look at how keyed events work, the hang is not surprising and shows the keyed events themselves are probably working as intended. My solution is to drop keyed events and go back to using a pool of notification events.

Joe L.

ARM 64bit, Apple gets the ball rolling.

2013.09.16

Apple does plenty of things I don't really agree with, but kudos to them for finally getting relevent ARM64 hardware in the field. I can't help but wonder now if there is a Rosetta-x86 team at Apple.

Curious that Apple did not file a patent for "64 bit CPU in a mobile device"? (sarcasm)

Seems like a bunch more ARM64 hardware is in the pipe. I am looking forward to what new platforms and devices appear over the next year or two. My wishlist is for a low cost micro-server that has some actual I/O bandwidth (PCIe, 10GB ethernet).

Joe L.

Binary Linux SDK.

2013.08.21

I have maintained an internal "Linux SDK" (ptlinsdk) for the last 3 years now, to build dependency controlled linux binaries. This SDK installs (rather it builds) on any reasonably modern linux or OSX system, and can then be used to build X86/x64/arm/ppc linux binaries that will run on most modern linux systems (5+ years back).

The SDK provides a GCC 4.4.5 compiler and various shared libs to link against for using the host systems glibc, X11, GTK, and some other libs. The expectation is that most libs beyond those included in the SDK will be be built as part of a project and statically linked, avoiding host system dependency issues. In total the SDK currently includes 53 separate open source projects, the largest and finickiest to build being gcc and glibc. Many of these projects needed significant diagnostic work and patches to get building with the specific versions of the other projects. Figuring out the best set of versions of all the projects was a time consuming endeavor, with lots of trial and error.

I won't say the time cost of the original work setting up the SDK. There was no rational business motivation to do it, I am just too bull headed to give up and support only Redhat. Even tweaking the SDK to keep it working has proven a nuisance. New build failures seem to magically appear everytime I install the SDK to a new build system.

I am aware of crosstool and such. These projects do not solve the specific problems I was targetting with the SDK, and in my experience they did not work for the range of components and versions I needed.

Joe L.

File ID support on Windows sucks, and keeps getting worse.

2013.08.07

On my current project I need reliable file identifiers, a binary blob that is unique to each physical file (not each file name) on the system, including those on local and remote volumes.

On the *nix platforms, the st_dev and st_ino fields work well. At any point in time on a running system, the st_dev-st_ino combinatation is guaranteed unique for a given file. Hard links can reliably be detected. Of course there a few edge cases that can screw things up, most notably mounting windows file shares.

On Windows, file-id support sucks. The first major problem is that there is no equivalent to st_dev, anywhere. In kernel mode you can fake it by hashing the ptr to the volumes VPB or DEVICE_OBJECT, but in user mode the only thing you can get at is the name of the object, the volume create time, and the volume serial number.

The general consensus by Microsoft seems to be that the volume serial number is what you should use, but this fails pretty quickly. Network shares return the serial number of the source file system volume at the _root_ of the share, but you get duplicate file ids if the share contains junctions or mount points. Even with local volumes, all you have to do is copy a VHD file and mount both copies to show how the volume serial number is pretty useless as a st_dev replacement.

A hash of the native object volume/device name seems about the only option, but getting this data cannot be done efficiently, or deterministically. I expect I will end up implementing a native object namespace prefix cache, with heuristics to try to handle the issues with redirector style file systems.

Oh, and ReFS no longer guarantees it's 64 bit file ids are even volume unique. For that you need to use the new Windows 8 info-types to query the 128 bit file id. It sure would have been nice for them to at least provide a hash compressed 64 bit file-id. Handling this case is going to slow things down even further.

Joe L.

I have had enough of C++, and I am not going to take it anymore.
(or, I wanna be a C-tard.)

2013.07.23

After 20 years of using C++ (in my own peculiar way perhaps) I am now officially a C-tard. I fought it for a while, but there is no denying it.

I still build modular designs using virtual interfaces, implementation hiding, polymorphism, and inheritance in implementations. But, I do it now in C. It is not hard, it is roughly the same amount of code and work as in C++, and the explicity of doing it in C grows on you.

What finally drove me away from C++? Practical motivations include the kernel environments I expect much of my code to be compatible with, but it was also a long list of frustrations trying to build, maintain, distribute, and/or support various C++ based cross platform projects.

Now if MS would stop holding C99 hostage...

Joe L.

Avisynth Virtual File System

If you know what Avisynth is, then you are probably here to check out AVFS.

Copyright © 2007-2019 Joe Lowe