i fell asleep sitting up for like an hour and then woke up and started compiling an optimized linux kernel and made a totally sausage sandwich of tuna and kewpie and rice vinegar on toastered soursdough. lets go 3 am

the latest nvidia driver (590.48.01) does not currently compile on the latest linux kernel (6.19) btw so im doin it over again

@qualia don't make me yeet an amd gpu at you

@vikxin I MEAN IF YOU GOT ONE LYIN' AROUND ,

i am so frequently redlining this 2080 super so hard you'd think i was trying to conjure an embarrassing agentic dr. sbaitso waifu

@qualia I don't have a spare one no, but I do have two in use at the moment. Thinking about going to RePC tomorrow to grab some Xbox controllers again. Sigh. It's that time of month.

yayy yippee 6.18 lets go be BOREing

*rebooting sounds, explosions, screaming, toilet flushing, crowd boos, CMOS beep, floppy seek noise*

Linux tailpulse 6.18.10-qualicachy #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Feb 14 03:23:06 PST 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux

done did it

@qualia how long does it take you to compile a kernel?? I've been doing it a bunch lately and from scratch is the better part of an hour. And I give it a bunch of cores and everything. Maybe I'm IO-bound?

@vikxin how are you going through xbox controllers

what on earth kind of hormonal cycle is this

@qualia while I did imply that as a joke the fact of the matter is that I keep needing weird and obscure variants of controllers. This time I need a wireless 360 controller and an adapter for it.

I can show you my collection of controllers I already have. Most of them still work. Most of them are also junk. Please clap

@vikxin @qualia how much have you trimmed it down?

it builds like every driver for every device in existence with distro racconfigs and that takes a huge chunk of that

@charlotte @qualia I'm using a very specific config that's somewhat but not hugely trimmed down. I know if I use a very minimal config it's much faster, but just building amdgpu alone adds a lot of compile time

@vikxin idk 15m? i didn't time it. i'm on a 14-core xeon (no hyperthreading), quad-channel ddr4. it's the CachyOS kernel so it's chock full of tweaky bullshit, it's also got a bunch of optimizations turned on (Thin LTO, -O3) which probably isn't helping build times. mayb i unset my goofy CFLAGS and try a vanilla 6.19 real quick

@qualia jegus. I have more threads than that, but it's only dual channel DDR4 and it's running in a VM with questionable IO performance

@vikxin oh yeag this is on modest nvme bare metal

@qualia oh yeah I'm not using NVMe here, I'm using ZFS backed by SATA SSDs. That's probably a big part of it

@vikxin oh fuck okay. yeah. fuckin' unity basically forced me to get on the nvme drive train to not lose my sanity, and it was like going from . well, not dialup to dsl. more like dsl to cable. during off-peak hours. yknow

it's like tangibly difficult to go back to SATA now, i thought it wouldn't be as significant of a difference as it is

@qualia yeah I'm only using SATA under duress. Read: my VM host doesn't have enough lanes for an NVMe zpool. The whole rootfs for this VM is encrypted via dm-crypt, and I don't really have anywhere faster I can put it. I've tried.

I'm not about to spend thousands to rebuild this on an Epyc box either ugh

@vikxin defconfig, -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic

Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready  (#1)
make -j14  1412.35s user 71.20s system 1032% cpu 2:23.68 total

@vikxin

small parallel random I/O

fio --name=random_rw --ioengine=libaio --rw=randrw --direct=1 --bs=4k --numjobs=14 --size=1G --runtime=30 --time_based --group_reporting --unlink=1

   iops        : min=41498, max=53467, avg=47941.68, stdev=181.72, samples=840
[...]
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
   READ: bw=187MiB/s (196MB/s), 187MiB/s-187MiB/s (196MB/s-196MB/s), io=5609MiB (5881MB), run=30002-30002msec
  WRITE: bw=187MiB/s (196MB/s), 187MiB/s-187MiB/s (196MB/s-196MB/s), io=5618MiB (5891MB), run=30002-30002msec

48k IOPS probably helps lol. i don't suppose you have enough free RAM you could build it in a ramdisk, do u

@qualia I do not know this fio program

Anyway the biggest problem is that I'm building via a PKGBUILD in a git tree. I'd have to make that whole subdirectory secretly mount a ramdisk without makepkg noticing and...I might be able to do that, but idk

Lemme check how much RAM that vm has

@qualia nah I'd need like 3x the amount of RAM I have haha. The build artifacts and everything add up to about 26 GB, and the VM only has 10

@qualia I have been so tempted to build a super overkill server for like 3 years but I really cannot afford it. It'd be $3k-$10k depending on how stupid I get and good lord can I not justify that

@vikxin honestly terrible time for it too with ram how it is

fio is an I/O benchmark tool, it's been around forever and does the thing pretty nicely

@qualia i could sell ram I'm not even using anymore that I bought in 2019 for a profit. That's fucked up

@vikxin yknow also if you've got a slot for it, sticking an NVMe drive on a PCIe riser and passing just the one fucker through raw to the VM might not be the worst idea for a scratchspace

@qualia the problem is lanes, not slots. Basically everything is in use, except maybe one NVMe slot on the back of the board? Idk. I also bought this board under duress when the chipset on my much better motherboard died on Christmas a few years ago

ughhhh

@qualia if you come over at some point I can open the thing up and show you just how much of a nightmare it is. I installed liquid cooling recently. It was the only way I could keep the 5950X from constantly overheating