• experbia@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

    • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      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?

      • thallamabond@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        /*

        • 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. */
        • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
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          6 months ago

          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?

          • genuineparts@infosec.pub
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            6 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.

  • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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    6 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.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    THE BELOW MESSAGE

    No, it’s “the message below” or “the following message”. Pick a lane.

  • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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    6 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

    • Takios@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 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.

    • cygon@lemmy.world
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      6 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 :)

    • Ooops@kbin.social
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      6 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.”

  • OmgItBurns@discuss.online
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    6 months ago

    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’?

  • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

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

  • Jourei@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Honestly, some people could use living without a TV (or many parts of the internet)