this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 344 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Nobody tell her about daemons.

[–] [email protected] 132 points 4 months ago

“Hacker folklore that pays homage to ‘wizards’ and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.”

—The Jargon File

[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago (1 children)

time.sleep() not found. Deamon exited. Child p_id=29 killed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Damn, that child with a weird name got obliterated.

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Wait till she learns about zombie children

[–] PoolloverNathan 121 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Is that TV just a CentOS box running VLC‽

[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

probably. this doesn't surprise me one bit.

If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.

most of the time they'll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it's functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.

if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv's solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on "totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv" on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.

The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.

everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't really call this a hack, electronic devices would cost twice as much of every OEM had to come up with their own hardware, drivers, frontend etc. Besides, this allows hobbyists to play with their hardware much more easily

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago

Running an absolutely ancient kernel.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Monroe electronics now https://www.digitalalertsystems.com/products makes boxes for cable headends that handle the emergency alert systems. It runs redhat if I remember correctly. They have internet connections a couple of different radio receivers in them. Centos here though

[–] [email protected] 91 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago

Kali Ma Linux

[–] [email protected] 85 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I mean... sacrifice child is a whole new one to me! Clearly whoever programmed that in knew what they were doing.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah lol I'm familiar with "kill child" in a process management context, but I've never seen the word "sacrifice" come up. Is that a thing?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

/*

  • If any of p's children has a different mm and is eligible for kill,
  • the one with the highest oom_badness() score is sacrificed for its
  • parent. This attempts to lose the minimal amount of work done while
  • still freeing memory. */
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nice. Imagine the lady in the post's face when she learns that "oom badness" is how they decide which child to sacrifice.

What's that from?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

From the source file oom_kill.c in the linux kernel. But it seems this has been reworded or changed since 2019. That's the commit that removed this.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 4 months ago

At this stage kernel 2.6 is ancient culture.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 4 months ago

I love that she sees a screen of text she doesn't understand, finds a few parts she does and freaks out, but turns out she doesn't understand those either.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago

CentOS is coming for your children!!!1

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

this lady is joking, right? right??

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean she does have a t-shirt that says "~~white~~ american privilege"

hope that answers to your question

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm not even sure I understand what that means. is it a diss on America for being too privileged?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

I take it as patriotic america first -slogan. the woman is some patriotic nutjob who has her podcast called truth uncensored of something like that so it's pretty safe to assume she is one of those christian maga idiots who would definetly lose their shit for seeing "sacrifise child" in their tv

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (4 children)

So is this the Linux version of Blu screen?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (3 children)

That would be an excellent band name.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Or a terrible name for a military commander.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Colonel Panic. Different spelling though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

That name would be a major ~~pain~~ Payne

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My band is currently searching for a name. I will add this one to the list.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago

No, the equivalent would be a kernel panic that the other user had linked. This is a situation where the RAM is fully used and a program's request for memory cannot be fulfilled. This is still a very bad situation because pretty much everything will grind to a halt. The Linux kernel thus makes a decision to kill a process (or multiple) until enough RAM is available again. Usually it kills the process with the most used RAM, but there's methods to influence the decision.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Nope, this is "Your system ran out of memory and now this program isn't reacting anymore (it's trying to allocate memory but there is no free memory left). Please stop the program or try to get rid of some of its subprocesses to free up memory."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an "out of memory" situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.

The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.

This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn't even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm not even at the point of processing if this is satire or not. Is the context that killing a process is offensive? I mean I get 'sacrifice child', but 'kill process'?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Kill, process, or sacrifice child

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Translation: "HELP I JUST BOUGHT THIS THING OFF AMAZON THAT'S SUPPOSED TO GIVE ME FREE TV TO DISTRACT MY KIDS BUT NOW ITS SAYING THINGS I DONT UNDERSTAND AND IM SCARED"

Also, please someone send her a L1ZY

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

All those old school (former) linux devs used to play DnD back in the 80s, right? Hmm. Satanic panic 2.0?

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