Fixing the pinephone keyboard after 4-5 years of daily use
I have been using a linux phone - not a "smart" phone, but as I like to call it a productivity phone - for the last 4-5 years and I can tell you that with the added keyboard it is an awsome productivity gain.
Everything can break however - regardless of how open or great it is - and its best to document how to fix it (the keyboard).
Tags: pinephone, electronics, low-level, fix, keyboard, linux
Debugging HyperZ and fixing a radeon drm linux kernel module
It was only a few days ago I have finished debugging a really heavy bug making as big of a mesa performance hit in the userland radeon driver that it became a news article on Phoronix. Back then while still on the heavy journey for getting my performance back I saw HyperZ was also not enabled for me, but if I enable it I gain 10-15% more performance - and an unplayable 3D screen.
On the original blog post I have also written about how to troubleshoot a performance issue generally, but what to do if you know about a performance increasing functionality - just you see it destroys the 3D picture?
Read on if you are interested in linux graphics internals once again ;-)
Tags: drm, hyperz, r300, radeon, linux, kernel, mesa, arch, 32bit, linux, debug, glitches, fix, contribute, open-source, graphics, stack, analysis, 3D, optimization, tutorial, system, internals, hackerman, opengl, zbuffer, hiz, zmask, documentation
Make it work 2: GT 97 Racing - "playing" the game
After creating the NO-CD version of the game it was time to play some is not it? It started out really hard and after perfecting the game while making it run without any lag... I have found that it is unbeatable on the first level even with a perfect drive!
It seems the internet is also complaining on this: People write on various places that there are versions which are unbeatable and versiouns which are beatable. Instead of finding a right versioun I thought it is best to go and 'play' a bit differently - 'play' with some debuggers and reverse engineering tools.
After all this became a much longer and harder journey than removing the no-cd code. The results are presented in this post, but if you are only interested in downloading the final binaries, scroll down to the posts end!
Also if you just want to see how I removed the CD-checks, look for the earlier post on this very same blog.
Tags: retro, gaming, dosbox, crack, gtracing, hacking, assembly, debug, hack, linux, cdemu, make-it-work, gt, 97, racing, trainer, fix, patch, bugfix, checkpoint, time, issues, too, little, bonus, no, cd, no-cd, problem, cannot, beat, pwn, h4x00r, hackerman