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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • waigl@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldThe good old days
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    2 months ago

    This is x86 assembler. (Actually, looking at the register names, it’s probably x86_64. On old school x86, they were named something like al, ah (8 bit), ax (16 bit), or eax (32 bit).) Back in the old days, when you pressed a key on the keyboard, the keyboard controller would generate a hardware interrupt, which, unless masked, would immediately make the CPU jump to a registered interrupt handler, interrupting whatever else it was doing at the point. That interrupt handler would then usually save all registers on the stack, communicate with the keyboard controller to figure out what exactly happened, react to that, restore the old registers again and then jump back to where the CPU was before.

    In modern times, USB keyboards are periodically actively polled instead.



  • Pipewire makes me feel like I’m a bit stupid. I keep reading about it, I read the introduction and FAQ on their website, yet I still couldn’t tell you what that thing even does. All I know is it’s a slightly less buggy drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is something I use because Firefox forces me to. (I would still be on plain old ALSA if it weren’t for Firefox.)

    Also, it definitely did not “just work” for me out of the box, I had to do quite some digging and some very non-obvious stuff to get it to a) start up and b) let me use my microphone. I still don’t even know what “starting up” really means for pipewire (is there a daemon or something?), the website likes to pretend that isn’t a thing, but without doing some stuff to start it up, audio just won’t work for pulseaudio and pipewire applications…