patches

NUMA Emulation speeds up Pi 5 (and other improvements)

Recently an Igalia engineer posted a NUMA Emulation patch for the Pi 5 to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He said it could improve performance of Geekbench 6 scores up to 6% for single-core, and 18% for multicore.

My testing didn't quite match those numbers, but I did see a significant and consistent performance increase across both Geekbench 6:

Raspberry Pi 5 Geekbench 6 Score comparison with NUMA Emulation enabled

And High Performance Linpack:

Raspberry Pi 5 HPL Gigaflops and efficiency comparison with NUMA Emulation enabled

Patching or using a forked version of an Ansible Galaxy role

I maintain a lot of Ansible Galaxy roles. I probably have a problem, but I won't admit it, so I'll probably keep adding more roles :)

One thing I see quite often is someone submitting a simple Pull Request for one of my roles on GitHub, then checking in here and there asking if I have had a chance to merge it yet. I'm guessing people who end up doing this might not know about one of the best features of Ansible Galaxy (and more generally, open source!): you can fork the role and maintain your changes in the fork, and it's pretty easy to do.

I just had to do it for one project I'm working on. I am using the rvm_io.ruby role to install specific versions of Ruby on some servers. But there seems to have been a breaking change to the upstream packages RVM uses, summarized in this GitHub issue. I found a pretty simple fix (removing one array item from a variable), and submitted this PR.

Minecraft Patching Guide for Macs

I've watched a few episodes of 'The Minecraft Project' on YouTube for inspiration, and I occasionally play Minecraft for an hour or two as a diversion (it's like LEGOs on a computer, but much more fun, because there are zombies!).

Jeff's Humble little Minecraft Farm
My humble little Minecraft farm.

One thing I've always liked is The Minecraft Project's look and feel, mostly due to syndicate's use of the DokuCraft Light texture pack. However, getting that texture pack to work along with other mods and patches (especially the automatic tool switcher mod) took some work on my Mac, and I thought I'd post my process for getting everything to work here, for the benefit of others having the same troubles (especially those getting the 'Use the patcher noob' messages where water, lava, etc. are supposed to appear):