Kay

When should I clear my calendar for approximately?

this is some of the most absolutely twisted shit ive ever read any device trying to pull. "the OS is decieved into thinking it's going to sleep when really its reality is being fundamentally altered such that it becomes someone else entirely" is an incredibly metal way to describe it. i feel permanently tainted after reading this you were right

This chost slaps thank you

gravis this is a magnificent piece of investigation and writing, thank you for this

This post inflicts permanent Warp. I have no fucking words. Truly the Chost Of All Time.

i like this tech and i'd like to find an excuse to use it

i wonder what cursed things uefi could do, but i've heard a lot of computers don't actually do it properly so idk if that would be useful

Hey, uh, perchance do you have the installer or know where to get a flash disk dump for Splashtop? I have an Asus ExpressGate motherboard and I just wanna see it for myself and do Linux Crimes

"Windows thinks it's taking a nap, but it wakes up as someone else, leaves the house, and commits murders it has no memory of."

wholly molé

i.. wh......dear lord have mercy on our souls what in the fuck

I'm not a computer scientist by any means, so I appreciate your putting in layman's terms (inasmuch as it is possible) the scope and scale of the devilry present in this device. I also have immense respect for the hours spent investigating this long-dead evil - maybe one day it will be useful in a different context.

why do i want one

hi! what the fuck

incredible writeup, thank you. some great turns of phrase too—I loved “langolier purgatory”

this is incredible investigative work thank you for doing and sharing it. resuming a different OS from S3 is a very clever hack, and im impressed they went to the further effort of a buffered ntfs file system driver.

What I'd be curious to know is whether that temporary journaling filesystem it uses for the windows filesystems in linux mode knows about / respects locks held by windows programs [via the dwShareMode parameter / the _fsopen CRT function (though all files opened via CRT functions are locked from being deleted/renamed)]. If so, then the 'files change out from under programs' issue is fully mitigated, and it certainly seems to do enough other windows kernel shenanigans that it might take a copy of the list of all active locks.

thank you for this. still in awe that someone decided it was a good idea to reserve a quarter of physical memory for this lunatic feature on machines that had nowhere near enough to start with. absolutely spectacular commitment to the bit.

especially since the netbooks that ran real actual Linux out of the box were basically fine. i had one from HP as my primary laptop for a year or two.

halfway through this post: oh my god this is Dahir Insaat Earthquake Bed for Windows

The first linux I used as any kind of daily driver was an ubuntu install in about 2010 that was somehow contained within a file on the windows system, and could access the windows filesystem at will (though it eventually corrupted itself, or was corrupted by windows). I have never seen its like again despite being fairly sure it was an official canonical product. Since then I've basically considered it a fever-dream and not really thought about it.

This is worse. Thank you so much

This post is fantastic but im also laughing because I use devilspie before streaming to just quickly arrange all my windows exactly. I had no idea it could do wild stuff like that

This thing must have been so hardware dependent that I'd be surprised if it ever worked on more than a handful of machines with a very specific Intel chipset/GPU and a very limited selection of devices onboard. I'd love to see their trick applied on a machine that had a GPU with its own VRAM not directly visible to the BIOS.

In any case, I need to go look at some pictures of kittens to try and forget the horrors I just read. Thanks for that, I hate it.

im amazed that this is somehow worse than i thought and my gut instinct at exactly the point you mentioned the mystery partition was... well, actually pretty close to what's actually happening but also completely wrong

(I thought it was doing a full suspend to disk on a portion of the hidden partition and then either starting or resuming the other OS. Which is close! But I did not expect they would segment the memory into reserved regions and then flipping them around. Although I did suspect that the linux side was allocated less memory to make starting it faster, since it would have to potentially pull saved memory contents off disk)

I don't get this. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem of two programs accessing the same file. Just because you delayed the write until the main OS was running again doesn't seem to solve anything.

I think the advantage is that at least you can detect conflicts at this point, like the whole "you can't delete this file because it's in use by another program" - some kind of error/warning is probably better than clobbering (maybe it would give you the option to keep a backup of the modified file, in event of conflicts?)

This was really interesting and a good read. Thank you for posting!

Excellent write-up for some really cursed technology

This is brilliant! Hooking S3 is clever, but buffering writes to the fs and replaying them after is absolutely inspired. I love it! Thanks for writing it up

this chost is a hall of famer

I kinda want one now, for no good reasons.

Also, i think the initial state the machine was in when you got it is the entire reason why many thought this was a good idea.

Users will absolutely destroy windows with garbage, and make it unusable. So having that alternate option meant that no matter how badly they messed it up, they could still have something that'd work until they got someone to look at it.

I'm curious, would that alternate reality been able to copy files onto USB from the Windows side of things?

this is a fucking RIDE

jesus fucking christ

i was also expecting some sleep-to-disk shit like apparently everyone else was, but this is unhinged

I love this. As a commercial product, it's an unmitigated failure. As a piece of engineering as art, it's only matched by the JBIG2 iMessage exploit. A round of applause to whichever group of Phoenix engineers implemented this in actual reality.

there is not one word in any languages spoken on our planet that accurately describe how fucked up this is

two wrongs don't make a right, but what about 40 of them

This is why you are my favorite poster on this site

After reading this I now believe that Modern Standby/s0ix is punishment for Phoenix's S3 sins

I own an SSD that is bootable but somehow not readable (even by dd), and this post still gave me nightmares.

The OS has halted itself, and is waiting to be told that it's time to wake up, but OSM instead proceeds to *alter the universe around it*.

This line really made me realize just how fucking incredible this post is, thank you so much

I love this terribly and I cannot put into words why so thank you for doing so for me

This is such a good post, thank you.

I can't help but imagine a bunch of new-hire CS grads who'd managed to take a good operating systems class thinking about their final assignment to write a preemptive scheduler and then simultaneously all turning to gaze hungrily at ACPI

This is a puzzle palaces of hacks that you'd expect to see in like, a MacOS-on-Windows-3.1 emulator circa 1993, not a late-2000s netbook!

my favourite variety of Tech Thing is when an astounding amount of effort, talent, and cleverness is put into an absolutely vile hack, and dear god this fits perfectly

i devoured this post, thank you so much this has renewed my love of computers and audacious hacks that we must hide from God

Wow, just, wow Also, you really outdid yourself finding something truly obscure and weird and then doing this level of analysis of it!

this is the most unbelievably cursed and beautiful software i have ever had the (dis)pleasure of reading about

haha, well

when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

[CW food, non-Vegan] ||when all you have is sour cream, everything looks like a potato||

when all you have is VC funding, everything looks like an opportunity

I’d be willing to bet that the still-working BBC API is just an RSS feed, which is still alive and working despite the tech press having declared repeatedly that it’s dead. Open standards work, y’all.

I just know that "In Conclusion, What The Hell" is going to live rent-free in my brain from now on

What is this monstrosity? What did Windows 7 do to deserve this?

I had an old Asus board that had ExpressGate, and even at the time it seemed rather useless, even though it was neat.

Are you planning on uploading the recovery system up to archive.org? It'd be fun to have a bit of a play with something like that, if I could ever get my hands on the hardware (or maybe it'd work with my N250Plus..?)

that processor is incredibly capable, with a bit of love! i wrote about my vaio vgn-p at https://artemis.sh/2022/01/12/life-at-800mhz.html which uses a much earlier atom; so if you ever feel like breathing life into it with a normal linux install, maybe some of my software recommendations there will help (especially around video playback, you can for sure do 360p h264, and probably 480p).

you should definitely install a 32-bit OS even though your processor is 64-bit capable. the RAM usage difference is astronomic because everyone loves to have lots of pointers in their software.

I don't understand computers, but I know whatever happened here wasn't right.

for me the true horror is 2009 linux skype, absolute hell

Several Sony Vaio models had a linux-based InstantON feature also. I had a Vaio TZ and a Vaio P that both had it. And hey the Vaio P was 2008 or 2009 and an Atom just like this. jesus-pointing.gif

It was linux but I don't remember seeing anything that said Phoenix or Hyperspace when I poked around in the files.

It was also essentially pointless. It drained the battery faster than either win7 or linux. (The P shipped with Vista but I didn't keep that for long so I can't say how it compared to Vista. I think the TZ was older and probably shipped with XP) Even the Vaio TZ, which had a dvd drive and a dvd player app in the InstanON, so in theory it should make a neat stand-alone dvd player appliance, was not a more convenient media player than just booting the full OS and running a regular media player.

I never could get it to boot anything other than the supplied InstanON kernel and initrd, but I did discover that it wasn't too picky about where those files were. They just needed to reside on an ntfs filesystem (maybe fat32 would work too, I don't remember if I tried that) somewhere on the disk. I had wiped the original windows and recovery partitions, created a new small partition just for the InstanON files, the rest was linux, grub in the mbr, no trace of the original mbr or windows BCD or the rest of Windows, and the InstantON still worked.

Bill Gates killed the netbook with his scheming. Netbooks used a special low-cost version of Windows, BUT if they ever went above a certain, painfully low spec, they'd have to ship with a much more expensive version of the operating system. Ever wonder why EVERY netbook seems to adhere to the same specs, ie 2GB of RAM max and a wimpy Atom processor? That was the reason. The really early netbooks (like my Asus EEE 701) came with Linux, but Microsoft quickly squashed that, too.

Netbooks were a hugely popular format at the onset- who wouldn't want a conveniently small and cheap computer?- but they were left in an evolutionary standstill, and couldn't grow along with the rest of the industry. The reason the netbook had such a short lifespan is because Bill Gates suffocated it in its crib. These days, tablets fill a similar niche, but we'd probably be using netbooks too if not for Gates' interference.

Anyway. Ahem. I bought a Dell Inspiron at an estate sale years ago for five dollars, and the previous owner put Windows 10 on it. It ran like you would expect Windows 10 to run on a netbook with 1GB of RAM, which is to say, abysmally. I've since replaced the hard drive with an SSD and installed Recalbox, but it STILL runs like dirty dog ass thanks to the damn videos Reek-all Box forces you to watch because the front end starts. You can't turn them off, and apparently they're been upscaled to 4K, because they're 4K-ing slow on this computer. Look, guys. I know you're proud of these videos you keep smashing in my face, but they're not doing ME any good at all. They were mildly annoying on Raspberry Pi but way, way worse on a netbook, since they slow everything down to glacial speeds.

what an excellent writeup about warlock magic that does unholy things

this is incredibly fucked up. reading this was truly the highlight of my day. thank you

Haha, this was a great read. I have to admit at some point I thought this was going to be some coLinux-adjacent shenanigans — I think they ran Linux kernel code through a Windows driver? Though obviously that wouldn’t give you any battery or boot time benefits.

world heritage chost

Damn, they... they store the context of a running os in memory... and then they create a new context for another OS... and then they restore the previous context, resume execution from where the OS last left off, oblivious to what its hardware was doing in the meanwhile... Did they... did they just invent cooperative multitasking on the OS level??? For this stupid corporate laptop gimmick??? "cooperative multibooting"?

Did the people who invented cooperative multitasking feel the same kind of horror we do on hearing this? Did they feel the same amount of shame over what they'd done to the poor programs? Or is human sympathy only reserved for big-shots like OSes?

Aside, can you please put up the installers or whatever files you can dump related to at least the dual resume thing (I don't care much for the specific linux derivative or the NTFS sync (IMO that one should remain forgotten in the recesses of history)) somewhere online, like archive.org? Doesn't matter if there's license stuff as long as all the files are in the installer, I've some practice patching DRMs on those. It could be interesting to see how it works or if it can be adapted into a general solution. (Isn't GRUB under the GPL? Shouldn't they have been required to release sources for any GRUB or GRUB-derived binaries they produced?)

re: something you said in the next post: UEFI can in fact chainload into MBR bootloaders. REFIND can do this and shows entries for any MBR bootloader drives. (Whether it needs CSM mode turned on, I'm not sure about.)

I'd love to have a play with this myself at some point. Would you be able to upload it? Maybe as an ISO (no idea how) or tar.gz?

this is an incredible write up of something absolutely bizarre

I keep revisiting this. just. thank you for this

This reminds me a bit of 'Flipper', a package for the Amstrad PCW that allowed multiple instances of LocoScript (a wordprocessor that ran on the bare metal) or CP/M to be loaded and task-switched between them. It would patch the memory detection code in each OS so they only used the memory allocated to them, and the reboot code so that a three-finger salute would bring up the task switcher rather than reboot the computer. Of course that was far simpler hardware running far simpler operating systems, so it was easier to avoid actions that could lead to things like filesystem corruption.