Having just completed a CP/M 3.0 BIOS for my homebrew Z80 machine, I am in awe at the amount of planning and foresight that went into it. The fact that you can write a piece of custom code in 2024 (for hardware that didn't even exist back then) and link it with the Digital Research binaries from the 70's to have a fully-functional and compatible O/S that is able to run almost any software written for CP/M in the past 40 years is just crazy.
Unlike CP/M 2.x, CP/M 3 allows for banked memory and disk data/directory buffers, resulting in a lot more usable memory for applications (Transient Program Area) and faster disk access. Although with an SD/CF card, the CPU is more the bottleneck than the disk I/O.
The project was both nostalgic and informative - trying to maintain performance while counting every byte of code has shed some great insights into low-level O/S design.
> Unlike CP/M 2.x, CP/M 3 allows for banked memory and disk data/directory buffers, resulting in a lot more usable memory for applications (Transient Program Area) and faster disk access.
Sounds a lot like what MSX-DOS 2.xx does as compared to its predecessor.
FYI: both versions of MSX-DOS are partially CP/M compatible, such that a # of applications running on it are slightly- or unmodified CP/M programs. Not unimportant given how much quality CP/M software already existed in early '80s.
One oddity resulting from this: some OS calls read or write files in multiples of 128 byte 'records' (regular MSX-DOS calls do handle exact file sizes though). Just guessing: sector size of ancient 8" floppies, or something like that?
Interesting - CP/M has a fixed sector size of 128 bytes. In CP/M 2.x, if your physical sectors were a different size, you'd have to implement deblocking code in your BIOS. CP/M 3.x still used 128 byte sectors, but supported specifying the physical sector size and would do the de-blocking for you.
I'm guessing MSX-DOS uses the 128 byte records/blocks to make it easy to read foreign disks and to be able to create disks readable on other platforms?
I think now a days most of those are in Calgary if we're being honest... they want an "independent western canada" which some how manages to ignore that British Columbia even exists.
Oh yeah definitely, I was half-kidding. Quebec and the rest of Canada have a lot of very significant differences. We are probably more divided right now than we've been ever since the last referendum.
An example I love to give is the holiday "Victoria day" in Canada which is called "Patriot's day" in Quebec, celebrating the attempted revolution in Quebec that were brutally put down by the English in 1837-1838.
Exactly. They have seized nothing, apparently. The author over at the verge apparently doesn‘t get it either. The only way this would make any sense is if we were looking at a multi-sig wallet where police has seized one out of two necessary keys, where the second one is a brain wallet or hidden somewhere.
The owner could hold and hope for another fork to happen if it ever does and spend on the fork side.
If they were determined and willing to break the law they'll probably wait to do a crypto swap. Trading BTC for another crypto that is easier to hide behind in the future.
The usual arguments I get is none of this matters because the individual won't be able to spend the crypto into anything of value. Government will monitor the wallet and then monitor any assets, securities, etc the German man has.
Nobody knows what the future will look like though and what happens if any country comes out supporting crypto as their default day to day currency? German man moves, becomes citizen, denounces his German citizenship to not need to report anything and is able to exchange crypto for assets and securities.
For $60M today and what might be +$100M when the time comes I'm sure there will be a path of spending 90%, keeping 10% and living a life of very little worry.
> Who can argue with amazing arguments like "Bitcoin is the
> money of the future because it will allow a fraudster to keep
> the proceeds of his crimes!"
The benefits outweigh the costs. Fiat currency is used for plenty of bad things, like funding wars and proxy wars. It would be a net gain if, for instance, fraudsters were a little more able to steal from gullible people but governments couldn't fight as many wars. Gullibility can, with proper education, be fixed, after all.
PXE Boot w/ NFS root - you won't get the bandwidth (about 112MB/s over gigabit Ethernet), but you'll definitely see the response time improvements (IOPS + latency).
This. I intend to do some more testing with my current cluster to see how much improvement I can get with one Pi 4 serving the traffic (vs each Pi running from its microSD card). And ideally seeing if a faster machine with faster storage could do even better.
If you end up doing this you should definitely make a post about it. I'm sure I'm not the only one incredibly curious on the real world performance and tradeoffs
QEMU/KVM/VFIO has come a long way. If you have a MacOS-supported GPU and working IOMMU (AMD) or VT-d (Intel), then you can achieve near-native MacOS performance for your CPU/GPU combo.
Unlike CP/M 2.x, CP/M 3 allows for banked memory and disk data/directory buffers, resulting in a lot more usable memory for applications (Transient Program Area) and faster disk access. Although with an SD/CF card, the CPU is more the bottleneck than the disk I/O.
The project was both nostalgic and informative - trying to maintain performance while counting every byte of code has shed some great insights into low-level O/S design.