Kostya's Boring Codec World

Since I admitted myself that I feel old, I guess it’s my solemn duty to yell at clouds time from time.

I consider satire to be the most realistic depiction of the world (unless it’s a pasquinade) and as Shakespeare put a phrase in a mouth of one of the King Lear characters, jesters do oft prove prophets.

For example, I still like to re-read various satirical pieces by Ilf and Petrov (probably the best Soviet satirists in the first half of XXth century) and one of those pieces gave a title to this post because of its similarity to what I want to talk about.

That short story mentions a game “loading a ship” (here’s the title) where a group of bored people tries to “load a ship” by calling things starting with the same pre-defined letter—lamps, Lilliputians, locomotives, liquors etc etc—until people can’t recall any more things starting with that letter or somebody suggest a name and people start to argue if that should be allowed. The story itself is about one man who metaphorically loaded a ship by inventing new and new social activities until at some point it was discovered that nobody remembers what are his direct duties should be and he was fired.

And here we transition to the Linux Foundation. Previously I thought it should promote Linux adoption, make some Linux-related standards and pay money to main Linux developers and maintainers so they can work on it full-time. But news in last couple of months showed me I was wrong.

First there was a piece of news about AgStack (Linux for Agriculture). Then there was a piece of news about Linux Foundation organising some unrelated initiative for Microsoft (while not participating in it itself). And finally there’s a piece of news about Open Voice Network, an initiative for ethical standards of voice assistants.

This made me wonder not just why I encounter such news but also what does the foundation really do. The answer did not make me more optimistic.

So it seems that Linux Foundation is transitioning from a foundation that does what I expected it to do to an organisation that does IaaS (initiative-as-a-service): you pay them and they prepare all required infrastructure to have it all running, just invite some organisations to participate. Beside that what are those member companies are paying for? I don’t know the official explanation but to me it looks like three major categories to put it very bluntly and impolitely: bribes, extortion money and indulgences. Bribes is what you pay to affect the politics of the foundation in a way favourable to you (maybe it’s called lobbying, maybe such things do not happen at all—give me facts and I’ll amend this post). Extortion money is what you have to pay to participate in various standardising activity (aka membership fees, no different from any other standardising activity). Indulgences are money you pay to avert attention from your GPL violations regarding the kernel sources (just search for GPL violators and Linux Foundation, you’ll find not just Chinese but American companies mentioned there; at least in one case the known GPL violator hasn’t published its modified kernel sources after becoming a member).

I could not find any reports about the foundation beside their 2020 annual report so I can only speculate how it has changed in the past regarding income, spending and stuff. Yet I can foresee three scenarios on how it may develop in the future:

1. Shifting to a different activity. Even now actual Linux-related things seem to be less than a half of what the foundation does nowadays, so maybe in the future it will realise that Linux is a legacy they don’t care any longer and maybe even rename themselves to reflect their new main occupation;
2. Fossilising. Linux Foundation may exist in the future but both its activity and being a member will become a tradition that nobody understands but they’ll keep doing it because it’s a tradition;
3. Withering. While Linux is relatively popular kernel, nobody can guarantee it will remain popular in the future. Linus himself is not immortal and his successor may be not as skilled, we have IBM trying to replace Linux kernel with systemd while keeping the name—or maybe some other reason will hurt Linux popularity. Or some other kernel will replace it in its major niches (I can easily imagine Android being rebased on Fuchsia; the same may happen to servers as well). In result Linux and Linux-related things will become not interesting to most companies and they’ll drop their financial support.

You may say that there might be a scenario where Linux Foundation will concentrate on Linux-only stuff but I’m sceptical. AgStack is a clear signal they run out of ideas where to promote Linux but in accordance with Parkinson’s law they’ll still keep growing by inventing new stuff as long as there’s enough income to employ more people, organise more conferences and such.

As usual, I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.

This is inspired by both a private discussion on why modern computing is so complex and my migration from Ubuntu 12.04LTS to systemd 20.04LTS.

Since I’ve finally changed from my less than ten years old operating system to something more modern I’ve noticed that it became noticeably slower (not irritatingly slower though but slower nevertheless) except for Firefox (which is probably not because of JS engine improvements but rather because of native execution of now supported APIs instead of polyfills). And trying various desktop environments before settling on Cinnamon I’m horrified by how bloated and unusable (to me) they are. My friends complain about modern technology demanding more effort to maintain because of complexity and weird interdependencies—while it’s supposed to make your life easier. So why it is like that?

For a keen reader the title of this post contains the answer. For the rest I’ll elaborate it below.
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This comes up in my conversations surprisingly often so I thought it’s worth to write my thoughts down instead of repeating them again and again.

As it is common with C programmers, C was not my first nor my last language, but I still like it and when I have to write programs I do it in C. Meanwhile I try to be aware of modern (and not so modern) programming languages and their trends and write my own multimedia-related hobby project in Rust. So why I have not moved to anything else yet and how C++ comes to all this?
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Sometimes I look inside Baidu Mail spam folder to see if there’s anything useful got there by mistake (notifications from various shops with purchase confirmations end there quite often, to give one example). And there’s a weird tendency I’ve spotted recently.

In the last five days I’ve received 47 spam mails. 37 of them were in French. I’m used to receiving spam in various European languages (including but not limited to Bulgarian, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish) but before last year it was mostly in English. Additionally a good deal of them now is about some promotional actions from supermarket chains like Aldi, Carrefour or Lidl (and I’ve never considered either of them to be some luxury store).

What’s wrong with this world?

Ghidra, as you should know already, is a disassembler and decompiler for unprofessional folks who can’t cough up a couple thousands dollars and pass background check to buy a disassembler and decompiler the experts use. And here’s a list of things that would make Ghidra better or much better for me. I know it’s opensource but I’d rather not touch large codebases written in Java (or any codebases written in Java really). Disclaimer: by the time of writing this I’m still using Ghidra 9.2 even if 9.2.2 has been available for months, but I doubt any of the things mentioned here are implemented already.

First of all, there’s a bug with x86 disassembly: while rep movsX is recognized and works fine, some of the code I’ve seen uses repne movsX which is treated as simple movsX even by disassembler. Initially I was confused by this bug and only disassembling instruction bytes with ndisasm proved that it’s not a compiler (or assembly author) missed a prefix but rather Ghidra ignoring it entirely. Some other rarely seen instructions that involve FPU operation and an addressing with segment registers (e.g. ES, FS or GS; if you don’t have an idea what those are for—be thankful for that) and explicit offsets are disassembled incorrectly, consuming a byte more than required (and thus making the following instruction to be disassembled incorrectly as well).

And speaking about assembly, current program text search is nice since you can search inside a specific part of an instruction (e.g. MOVSD.REP in instruction name or 0x800 in its operand) but it would be even better to have a more generic search by a regular expression. Quite often I want to locate a specific instruction doing e.g. shift left by five. The problem is that there are many shift instructions and even more instructions with an operand having 5 somewhere in it. And I don’t know the exact operand register so searching for shl eax, 5 first, then shl ebx, 5 and all the way to shl dh, 5 is tedious. The same can be said about dumping listing and searching there. It will work as intended though.

Beside the issues above and idiosyncratic x86 assembly syntax (it does not bother me much though) I have nothing else to complain in disassembler, so let’s move to the decompiler issues.

I suspect that decompiler output is not stored permanently, but it would be nice to mark some function as being “decompiled, it’s fine, do not touch it, I mean it”. Looks like the process of function being decompiled again and again even if you change something not related to it in any way is annoying not just to me. So it would be nice to mark some large decompiled function as permanently decompiled so it’s not re-decompiled on a subsequent visit to it.

And speaking of functions, it would be nice if functors (aka function pointers) would be supported instead of just detecting that this variable is a pointer to function. When arguments are passed by stack, decompiler usually can detect that. But when arguments are passed in registers you have to trace the registers and their values by hand. Of course you’d need a monstrous syntax to specify a type for e.g. a function that accepts three arguments in designated registers but I can still wish for it, can’t I?

Another thing I often wish for is being able to tell decompiler that after a certain point the variable is no longer valid and it should treat subsequent uses of that register or stack as a new variable. A very common example is when a first argument (usually some context pointer) is moved to a register (or it is passed in a register already), some fields are read from the context, context value is stored to some local variable and the initial register is used for example as a loop variable that gets decompiled to something monstrous like for (ctx = (Context*)0; ctx < (Context*)42; ctx = (Context*)((int)ctx + 1)) { ... } and it also screws types for variables involved in the same expression as this loop counter.

Of course not all of these things can be easily implemented, and maybe some of them would require architectural changes. But I prefer to cherish my ignorance on Ghidra internal details and just point out what I’d find good to have in principle.

Probably it’s exactly when you start complaining about things changing you realize you’ve become old. And as you can guess this is my turn to complain about things changing.

The last tipping point for me was when I tried to update rustc from version 1.33 I’d been using. I wanted to do it mostly for three things: atomic types beside bool and usize (for the use in NihAV video player that should be written eventually), replacing now deprecated mem::uninitialized(), and being able to switch to a newer version of SDL2 bindings for the future video player (because old version depends on about 25 crates more than a newer ones).

So I tried latest-and-greatest rustc 1.51 and ran cargo clippy to see what has changed meanwhile. And beside seeing that now there’s a special macro matches!() as a convenient shorthand for checking object type to be some variant(s) I could not see anything useful because the linter spammed everything with “selected name is bad, you should change NASomething into NaSomething“. Which looks ugly and dropping the NA prefix entirely may make names too generic and collide with the standard ones. And before you tell me: I’m aware of the lint suppressor flag and that there’s a fix for it that makes it not to complain on public names. Still, I find this brain-damaged and thus I’ve settled on rustc 1.46 for now.

Then there’s an even funnier thing. I’ve discovered that crates.io (the site for navigating Rust packages) has stopped working in Firefox 52 (docs.rs still works fine—for now). Probably because of some JavaScript new feature (which is invoked inside rather large bundle) the scripts cannot be parsed and it simply gives you a cryptic message “Sorry, it looks like we were not able to load the page.” without explaining much. The problem is most likely at your side, you find it out.

My friend Luca actually wasted some time to create an issue for that and got an obvious reply that the browser is outdated and this is expected. For the record GitHub at least prints a message that the browser version is too old and not supported (yet the main functionality is still working), the same is true for WordPress instance where I’m typing this post.

So why don’t I update this four-year old browser? Because it’s painful. The browser is tied to the Linux distribution so either I should compile it myself (I tried that once with earlier Firefox, ran out of disk space and almost of swap space too; so I’m not eager to compile any browser more complex than elinks). The other alternative is updating the distribution and that is even more painful because of the drastic changes in software.

I’m not talking about desktop environments per se even if they expose the problem. I don’t care much about how the windows look like or where launch menu is located. But I do care about the programs I used to being no longer the part of the distributive or changing their interface in radical way. Simple example: for various reasons I like to have several input layouts and methods (for English, Ukrainian, Russian and Japanese language). On Ubuntu 12.04 I have keyboard layout switching between English and Ukrainian layouts (the latter can also produce Russian or Belarussian letters with AltGr) plus mozc to input Japanese (previously it was Anthy and who knows what will be the default Japanese IME in 2024). On Ubuntu 18.04 (which I use on a different machine) you can’t set it up the same way, Ukrainian layout does not have AltGr support and mozc by default outputs Latin characters with no setting or key combination to make it output kana by default (of course I can simply press kana mode change key on my Japanese keyboard—but that means connecting an external keyboard just for that). And even if my fingers are the wurst I have sausage fingers hardly hitting a correct key on the first time, I still want to perform keyboard actions using keyboard.

The sad thing is that I somewhat understand why this happens. Web sites get bloated and do not work with older browsers because of the browser war (no plural, you know The Browser) and shiny features developers are eager to try (and testing for older versions takes time and efforts better spent elsewhere—if people remember about it at all). Some programs need to be updated because of security issues (e.g. I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 mainly because of TLS troubles leading to programs not being able to open half of the sites over HTTPS). Some programs get replaced because the maintainer left and there’s nobody to step in. Some interfaces need to be adapted to the new reality (while Debian on Nokia smartphones is not so popular now, Ubuntu on tablets seems to be the next popular thing). And there’s GNOME and freedesktop.org which seem to be the main sources of disruptions. I can’t explain the logic by which they change things but it’s because of their view the mountpoint for network shares in the next release will probably be different from two previous places (and when you’re still using command line to access files on those shares like I do this feels annoying).

The sad thing is that all other non-toy OSes have the same problems. Windows users might still remember Windows Vista GUI affectionately and like how Windows 10 changes GUI elements time from time. *BSD seems to be more stable but they still support GNOME. macOS users might be still ashamed for their muscle memory failing them when OS update decided to reverse scroll direction. This is also why Linux kernel is still precious: it still cares about its interfaces being backward compatible so the userspace can rely on them while you can’t say the same about glibc 2.16.

And here we have it. As I said in the beginning this whining about programs and environments changing constantly mostly tells that I’ve become old. On the other hand if you think this “move fast and break things” motto is a good idea—remember who coined it and think again.

Disclaimer: I try to write posts mostly about multimedia stuff but some things are nagging me for a long time. So I write this to get rid of that nagging and move along with my lack of life.

First of all, I need to say that even if grew up in a land that mostly favoured Sierra games, I don’t think low of Monkey Island series (the first three games for sure). The setting is interesting and fun, the graphics was good (for the first three games at least), the music is memorable (even if iMUSE system was under-appreciated), the characters became part of the culture. I’ve played them countless times (MI1 both floppy and CD versions too) and would probably play again soon. I agree that those are very good games but there’s one thing about them that prevents me from agreeing with the majority that MI 1 and MI 2 are one of the best adventure games of all time.
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