sandbox VS ostree

I've made a similar game: https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox, and it looks like we've had a lot of the same ideas :)

If you're interested in game development, you may enjoy playing around with Sandbox. It's a game I created where you place sand, water, acid, fire, etc and watch them interact.

> WebGPU is years away to become usable

As a counterpoint, I've been using WebGPU (through wgpu-rs) for the past 1.5 years. It's been a pleasure to use. For instance, here's the CPU-side code for a glow post-process shader using 4 render passes https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox/blob/master/src/glow_post_p....

I've considered implementing Sandbox using wgpu compute sharers (all the rendering is already done with wgpu). The reason I didn't is because I couldn't figure out how to make particles update in parallel - how to handle conflicts between two particles wanting to move into the same position, updating a particle that's supposed to be destroyed, etc. I'd love to get this working however. My last attempt was a the "multithread" branch where I tried to use rayon as a means of prototyping the game using parallel update logic.

Unrelated to a club, but you might enjoy looking at a game I built with Rust + WebGPU https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox.

Counterpoint: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.jms55.Sandbox

Not a GSOC project, but my game Sandbox is open to contributions! https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox

Overflowing the stack: Use a Vec, or Box<[T; N]> (boxed array). A boxed array is a heap allocated array, where the box part just points to some data on the heap, so it's cheap to move around. Both are pretty much equivalent, boxed array is maybe slightly more faster/correct. Note that if you use a boxed array, due to some missing compiler optimizations, you'll probably just get a stack overflow anyways, as the compiler will first store the array on the stack, and then copy it to the heap. This can be solved with some unsafe code, such as in https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox/blob/master/src/heap_array.rs.

Ansible makes mutable changes to the OS, task by task.

Nix is immutable. A new change is made entirely new, and only after the build is successful, all packages are "symlinked" to the current system.

Fedora Silverblue is based on ostree [1]. It works similarly like git, but on your root tree. But it requires you to reboot the whole system for the changes to take effect. Since Nix is just symlinked packages, you don't need to reboot the system.

More detailed explanation here [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree

[2]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-07-12-intro-to-immutable-...

This one is for the ostree bug currently ongoing: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2900

This sounds related to the ostree bug.

I definitely agree that immutability offers considerable value in regards to improving security. But arguably it's insufficient to pull the win over mutable Fedora due to the losses caused by the inability to install the kernel-hardened package and the lack of UKI (Unified Kernel Image) support.

Other hardening guides mention a Unified Kernel Image as another measure to further improve security. Unfortunately, once more, this is (currently) not supported on Fedora Silverblue. I haven't seen it being done on openSUSE Aeon either. Though, once again, I'd love to be corrected!

The fedora crew is working on it through ostree though, so both fedora Silverblue and flatpak will be getting it (as well as true immutability) in the future: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2867

Aside from what has already been mentioned, Unified Kernel Image isn't supported (yet).