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This is exactly what magnetic flux imaging does, it just uses a regular floppy mechanism with all the risk that entails.

If one built a more sensitive head mechanism that floats above the disk, one could (say) load a disk sans envelope/case and take a flux image of it without anything touching the surface.

Then one could use the existing flux processing software (possibly tweaking it) to extract the data.


Are you suggesting this didn’t happen, or that they’re hypocrites for publicizing it while taking Saudi money?

Every authoritarian regime does this, and some legitimate non-totalitarian governments do too.


Yes, they are very obviously suggesting it didn't happen. I have no idea why certain people on the left want to ignore what is happening on Iran, and even pretend like nothing problematic is happening in Iran.


Nobody’s saying nothing problematic is happening in Iran.

What I’m saying is that a lot of people are extremely interested in seeing Iran fall and that Western media paid by Saudi Arabia has exactly zero credibility. So get better sources, that’s all.


It should just be a matter of producing a kernel and, if necessary, RAM disk that can be booted the same way as Linux.


“just” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.


Yes and no; kernels aren’t magic, and “change how this kernel is loaded to match how Linux does it” is actually a reasonable first assignment for an Operating Systems class at a top-tier school. (You’re basically just creating an alternative `main()` if you don’t need a RAM disk image from which to load drivers.)


It's a first assignment if you are talking about a computer from 1990.


What, pray tell, would you do for a first assignment in an Operating Systems class at a top-tier school that actually involves making changes to on realistic operating system code?


This is the set of assignments they do at the university of Illinois (a top 10 computer engineering school): https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece391/fa2025/assignme...

It looks roughly the same as when I took 15 years ago, except they switched to riscv from x86. Honestly, what you're describing sounds too difficult for a first assignment. Implementing irq handlers or syscalls on an existing codebase is far more realistic, plausible, and useful.


I had to implement system calls in xv6.

You can look up which top tier schools use it for OS classes.


At the risk of getting further off-topic: what sort of system calls did they have you implement? I’ve never done but a tiny bit of kernel hacking and that sounds like a good exercise, but I’m not sure what would be a good first syscall to add.


Try asking your favorite llm. They will even guide you with a small curriculum.


Advice like this, and then people wonder why they’re lonely.


I don't know… people were lonely before LLMs. And, they're right, this is a question one could easily paste into a frontier model and easily get back info that's way more useful than the significant majority of blog posts or replies would give! shrug But also I'd still like to hear what fooker has to say!


Oh, is that what MIT’s using these days?


Then one needs to launch it. Not sure if there are any lancher UIs out there, or if one has to write custom code for that.


Parallels will run a VM that can (manually) boot bsd.rd from the EFI shell if you stick BOOTAA64.EFI and bsd.rd on a FAT32 GUID formatted.dmg, connect it to the VM, then boot EFI shell. Type:

    connect -r
    map -r
    fs0:
    bootaa64.efi
    boot bin.rd
Then you'll be in the OpenBSD installer, having booted an OpenBSD kernel.

You can grab the files from: https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/arm64/

Actually installing the system is left as an exercise for the reader.


My point is that as long as OpenBSD can boot like Linux, you just have to tell whatever VM front-end you’re using that you’re booting a Linux but give it an OpenBSD kernel and RAM disk.

Traditionally BSD has booted very differently than Linux, because Linus adopted the same boot process as MINIX when he first developed it (since he was actually using the MINIX boot blocks at first).

BSD has historically used a bootstrap that understands V7FS/FFS and can load a kernel from a path on it. MINIX takes the actual kernel and RAM disk images as parameters so it doesn’t need to know about filesystems, and that tradition continued with Linux bootstraps once it was standalone.


Who else was rdev'ing the Linux kernel to tell it where the root ext2(?) partition was long before they were using RAM disks? Like with SLS or MCC?


Originally Linux had Minix FS, followed by ext. Ext2 wouldn't make an appearance until 1993 by Rémy Card, so it depends on when you were using it.


At least as of the last major macOS release, that will not work, because the PCIe LSI SCSI HBA driver doesn’t have the extra stuff needed to support external PCIe.

It’d be a pleasant surprise if Apple implemented that for macOS 26 but I wouldn’t hold my breath.


Interesting... What bothers me is that you'd think that with Mac Proc M2 having advertised support for "storage" cards and lots of PCIe slots, at least some SCSI HBA's would have drivers?


The SCSI protocol driver on macOS is there mostly for USB devices speaking the enhanced storage protocol and similar use cases. That’s how a USB-SCSI adapter from 1999 actually still works on modern macOS.

The PCIe SCSI card driver on macOS is for LSI32032 and related cards, and at least as of last year’s release only works on an internal PCIe slot on a Mac Pro, not in a Thunderbolt-connected slot in an external PCIe enclosure. (Apple “just” needs to implement some extra functionality to support them in external slots, but they no doubt have lots of competing work to do.)


This is what GBSCSI/ZuluSCSI are already.


GBSCSI and ZuluSCSI support “initiator mode” that can be used to either image an attached SCSI disk to a file on an SD card or provide live access to it over USB as a mass storage device—with better performance than the old USB 1.1 SCSI adapters too, which top out at about 750KB/sec.


They are still USB 1.1 however, so they won't be able to surpass that speed limitation over USB.


They’re not really designed to be adapters in that direction anyway; the more intended use is that you use it to image a drive to a file on an SD card, and then use that file with a GBSCSI or ZuluSCSI going forward.


The point is that you can do reads/writes to it on a super-faster SD card reader on your main system, and then also use it with the ZuluSCSI/whatever. USB long ago exceeded SCSI’s data rates.


Thanks, looking into this more now.


By 1992, the Mac had supported color for almost twice as long (5 years) as it had been a monochrome-only system (3 years).


There’s a huge difference between anti-design bias and calling out Liquid Glass for the garbage human interface design that it is. If anything, it demonstrates a substantial *pro-design* bias because it shows that people actually care about design more than any “party line” here.


The state gets to say what the limits on private property held by people and entities outside its jurisdiction are.


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