Bits, bytes, and blinkin' lights.
I dabble in cryptocurrencies, occasionally. I hesitate to get too partisan on a subject the Internet takes very seriously, but it seems to me that the fairest judge of a coin’s value is the utility it provides to its holders. So Bitcoin is useful because everyone recognizes and accepts Bitcoin, Monero is useful because it facilitates anonymous transactions, Ethereum has that smart contracts thing going for it, and so on and so forth.
Introduction: What is VGA passthrough?
Answer: Attaching a graphics card to a Windows virtual machine, on a Linux host, for near-native graphical performance. This is evolving technology.
This post reflects my experience running my VGA passthrough setup for several years. It is not intended as a complete step-by-step guide, but rather a collection of notes to supplement the existing literature (notably, Alex Williamson’s VFIO blog) given my specific configuration and objectives. In particular, I am interested in achieving a smooth gaming experience, maintaining access to the attached graphics card from the Linux host, and staying as close to a stock Fedora configuration as possible. Hopefully, my notes will be useful to someone.
Piazza is a free classroom discussion service marketed for science and mathematics classes. It is best described as a hybrid wiki and forum; students can post questions, and other students can collaborate on answers. Like WordPress, content can be formatted with a rich-text editor or with plain HTML with a restricted set of features. Piazza’s distinguishing feature is the ability to post anonymously, which it claims makes underrepresented groups in the sciences more comfortable with interacting with the class. At UT, the computer science department makes extensive use of Piazza for most of its classes.
Piazza is primarily accessed through the web interface on piazza.com. Of great interest, there is also a “lite” web interface designed for mobile devices and accessible browsers at piazza.com/lite. I will demonstrate that Piazza is susceptible to common client-side web attacks, such as cross-site scripting, as a result of its reliance on web apps. (There are also native iOS and Android apps, but they are awful, and nobody uses them.)