Quick Start Ep 4: The Unholy Saga of Phoenix Hyperspace
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2024
- I have no words for the horrifying acts I've uncovered in this video. Wait. Yes I do. I have like an hour and fifteen minutes of words. Well, carry on.
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I made a shirt based on the patent text in this video since several people suggested it:
cathoderaydude.creator-spring...
My article on which this video is based:
gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm
Chapters:
00:00:00 Teaser
00:01:07 Intro
00:03:05 Phoenix's misfortune
00:06:16 Introducing the machine
00:09:39 Introducing Phoenix Hyperspace
00:12:00 Hyperspace tour
00:36:48 The problems with dual-booting
00:39:50 Hyperspace Hybrid
00:45:08 Battery life claims
00:48:13 The Hyperspace Trick
00:52:20 Nitty gritty
00:57:40 The Nightmare Begins
01:00:40 Wrongs darker than death or night
01:02:46 Moving on to the lesser crime
01:08:00 In summary
01:09:35 The death of Phoenix Hyperspace
01:13:35 Outro - Наука та технологія
![Little Guys: Episode 1 [Logic AU912]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GQmj1P-DSoY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Headstart's PC With The Weird GUI "OS" [Explorer]](/img/n.gif)
I'm pretty sure using your businesses knowledge of BIOS happenings to slip a tiny Linux into the mirror-verse of an otherwise bog-standard windows machine is the cleverest and most perverse dark magic I've ever witnessed in my decades of doing computer things for a living.
Well played, Phoenix BIOS et al devs. Well played.
I had one of these, free with an internet subscription, installed debian on it, wasn't that bad
They did the "two dates in the same restaurant" trope and fucking pulled it off.
@@ThetaReactor This is absolutely the analogy for it. But I still can't help but feel, they were a kid dropping a piece of silverware on a hard floor distraction away from the two dates seeing each other, recognizing each other, and saying "Hey girl!"
@@nickwallette6201 One of them was essentially doing the other's homework every time they switched off, so even that doesn't seem to capture the enormity of the situation.
Gaslighting the OS is a hilarious and according to how you explained what's going on, is exactly what it's doing. That is some very serious tech voodoo. Of course, a BIOS manufacturer had the magic to do it. Awesome.
Well in a sense all the ring minus whatever tomfoolery is nothing else but gaslighting OS and mentally abusing CPU in a lot of horrible ways, including providing semi-backdoors (which have been hacked at least once) that the OS (or antiviruses running in it) have absolutely no way of knowing even exists
@jwhite5008 Right?! I had a similar thought. I'm no programist but I would imagine someone could write something to live in this magic memory space that would turn the computer into a soft-werewolf (I know, I'm not proud of that one either) and moonlight the machine to do whatever you want while it sleeps. I know they are just machines, but it feels wrong! The CPU did not give enthusiastic or even informed consent!
@@BurritoVampiresoftwarewolf.... Heheheh
@@BurritoVampire BIOS and CPU allow ring minus something code to be transparently executed while the computer is running too - it allows BIOS to do stuff it needs to do like controlling fan speed based on temperature without effecting CPU and compatibility to software.
@@jwhite5008Which is exactly why the clunky implementation of even modern bios seems terrifying. We've seen various source files get leaked and even the way board manufacturers like Asus inject software packages into the OS is an exploit waiting to happen, if it hasn't already.
I used to be an ACPI programmer when I worked at Gigabyte. All of us validation guys had to know how it all worked so we could check things before we killed hardware. Some of the things I saw in pre-production BIOSes were crimes unspeakable, but this is completely insane. I want one. I want a desktop motherboard with this feature.
I'd like to read a blog of an ACPI/Firmware programmer at Gigabyte.
the release software seems to contain unspeakable crimes too
Would this still work now? I know UEFI is orthogonal to ACPI, but I suspect things are much hairier with it involved.
@@paulie-g It would be harder, but I can't immediately think of anything that stops it from happening.
@@kintustis at least the release software doesn't manually bit shift things to clear the first few bytes and clear blocks before the confirmed recieve signal is returned.
I sat here, with Looking Glass displaying a completely accelerated Windows environment in a window on my Debian Linux desktop, through a process that involved committing existential computer crimes of my own, going "I bet it's gonna be funny but there's *no* way it's *that* wild."
I........ Stand corrected. I feel like a teenager who'd convinced himself he was a sorcerer, who's just caught a glimpse of the world beyond Azathoth's dream. This is nightmare shit. I'm _obsessed._
When I bought my current computer I took great pains to make sure it was capable of that, but still haven't actually set it up because it hasn't made it onto my todo list nor actually been worth doing. Go figure.
Tried to enable GVT-g Intel VM graphics acceleration on my computer once. Forgot to patch the Intel graphics driver for correct VGA arbitration, and then booted a non-UEFI, accelerated VM. The host system's entire graphics palette corrupted and glitched out. It was like glitching Super Mario World or 16-bit Sonic and watching the binary vomit fireworks.
LMAOOO honestly that's completely fair!! @@keithstathem872 I had very specific reasons for doing so, if it weren't for them, I wouldn't have bothered.
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7 That's metal.
this is amazing. I'm not sure if I want to shake their hand or punch them in the face, but it's definitely amazing.
I'd go with the punch then the hand shake in that order. But that's just me. 😂
OMG it's Foone! Can I get your autograph?
Or did I already get one when I reported a bug in your MLBPA Baseball data miner?
@@bootmii98 not if I get it first!!!
Foone is just a dictionary of words posing as an AI that fits on a DMF disk.
The Hyperspace Hybrid reveal made me wince away from my screen, for all of my experience playing around with VMs. The HyperSpace Dual reveal however? I was grinning like a madman at my screen. Those Phoenix devs truly are iconoclastic gods, toying with the realities of OS developers amidst a nuclear waste site of pure unadulterated nope.
I can fully picture an engineer starting to say "you know what'd be funny..." at a meeting while brainstorming about making Phoenix's own instant boot solution. Insane people. Props to em.
This is exactly how I feel about it. I can picture somebody in a meeting going "well I guess technically we could do..."
It's magical, I wish I could've worked with them as a software developer. (I'm 'too young' though and from the wrong country)
If I remember correctly asus had something similar
@@NicVandEmZ ExpressGate was nothing like this. It was a separate OS that required a reboot to enter, so just dual booting.
A horrible, horrible idea I just had... the hypervisor solution _could_ still have used hardware passthrough. But only if the hypervisor was configured to only let one of the two VMs "run" at a time, suspending one VM before launching the other. In between those two states, the hypervisor could be tasked with dumping one VM's VRAM and loading in the other VM's VRAM. That way the hypervisor could tell each VM that it has dedicated access to "the GPU".
This is a case where I *really* want a developer to come forward to talk about their side of this
I am not a computer person. I clicked this out of pure curiosity. What they’ve done here as far as I understand is give a computer Dissociative Identity Disorder. It has multiple personalities that don’t know about each other. Absolutely bonkers. I have subscribed immediately.
As a system, that's basically it, lmao.
“… obfuscated by B.E.E.R. and PARTIES…” is perhaps my favorite novel sentence fragment I’ve heard in quite awhile.
Read your comment before I heard him say it, and still got a laugh.
I miss the days when engineers were allowed a sense of humor.
Your description of what Phoenix is doing to the computer hardware felt like an existential crisis! My jaw DROPPED when you described that. When I first saw the switch between Windows and that tiny Linux I thought maybe there was some kind of ARM processor running Hyperspace at all times, but no, it's worse. It's so incredibly cursed and I really cannot wait for this to fall out of patent so it can be used to do something else!
Really? I guessed both OSes were in memory at the same time and the BIOS did something to select which one the computer woke up in. I've worked on systems in which an entirely secondary OS was obliviously running as a single process in the primary OS so I have experience with desperate solutions like this.
@@scottlarson1548Weird flex but ok?
Funny you mention the ARM thing, there's a Dell laptop that did basically just that for its instant on experience; they stuffed a smartphone SoC on the motherboard.
@@LonelySpaceDetective My only possible reaction to that information is: 🤣
Incredible "Hey, as long as it works" energy
@@LonelySpaceDetective You cannot just drop this and not say its name or model lol
"And ACPI catches that request, THROWS it away, and begins to alter the universe" made me almost choke on my drink, thank you :D
A note on someone who has used widgets. 14:00
I work in a silicon wafer manufacturing plant.
The computers still use windows 7
And we put clock widgets on all of the computers bc we have no clocks in the cleanroom and the widget it easier to glance at a distance than the tiny time indicator in the bottom corner
hearing him say "they shouldn't make laptops bigger than that" three episodes in and im finally getting the joke.
@@epicnop7789 He shrinks the size of the laptop every episode
Unironically, I can't use a laptop bigger than 12 inches, it's just too unwieldy otherwise. I've stuck with my x220 for years and will continue to do so until it dies or modern OSes no longer support it.
@BhagwantRai654 look into the Japanese Panasonic Let's Note series of laptops. I went from an X220 to a CF-SV1 and have not looked back (except the trackpoint) the form factor is identical, the port selection on the panasonic is amazing, it even still has VGA and fullsize ethernet, on a laptop made in 2021 and the battery life is very good. chances are itll tick all your boxes
i've always jokingly said that, if faced with eldritch horrors, i would simply Understand Them because i'm Built Different. on this fine day i have been humbled
You've always said that huh?
I would have never expected the Strange Case of Dr. Windows and Mr. Phoenix to be a thing in computer history.
37:18 - "You only see it on computers owned by people who know enough about how to make things harder for themselves."
This. Every time. Hit right in the feels. 😂
This is like, 80% of my history of almost 20 years using Linux hahaha
I desperately and deeply hope that at least one of the original engineers responsible for this comes across this video some day. What an incredible work of flawless x86 black magic.
OMG, I'm not even that impressed by the ACPI hackery, but the offhand "oh, let's make NTFS replay a journal of stuff that was written behind it's back" simply to be able to have a read-write environment, a feature that no one would miss if it wasn't there..... That's just insane. I love it so much. It sounds like those meetings where you go "well, you could technically do this" and they just did it!
If ACPI hack was "that's absolutely cursed idea, but ok, that's how they did it", NTFS hack they've done sounds like black magic to me, really.
yeah, the acpi switch is pretty close to being a vm except they get the whole system (minus some parts of the ram) (with bios as its hv) but the filesystem hack is playing with fire. I wonder how it deals with updating locked files...
@@nanayanet There's definitely a way to break this. And I shudder to think how long it would have survived Windows updates. There is no doubt in my mind that, eventually, this would end in tears. You just can't expect a dynamic environment like Windows -- thoroughly outside your control -- to remain consistent enough that this wouldn't eventually fail to behave as expected.
@@nickwallette6201: And yet, NTFS does follow strict rules, so it might actually not cause problems.
@@yjk_ch It's not so bad, becase you're interested in only 3 types of operations that you want to apply to (replay) on your NTFS partition: create, rename (or attribute change) and delete. Rename and delete only replay the journal using standard file handling functions, no difficulty there. And for create, imagine if you had a "placement create" of sort, a function that doesn't exist in the DDK, but which would take all the usual file creation stuff plus the list of cluster numbers where the file is actually found. They could just copy an existing file creation routine from the NTFS driver and modify it, this way it updates the internal state of the NTFS driver just the same as the normal functions that exist there. When writing the file contents from Linux, they could simply put it anywhere in the unallocated space of the NTFS filesystem, merely following the clustering rules, which is actually super easy.
If you want to make it really simple and resistant against system updates changing the NTFS driver too much, you can just have a mailbox in the Lnux partition on hard disk of like say a hundred megabyte in capacity where the journal including new file contents is placed, and is replayed using super standard file IO routines on Windows, so basically there wouldn't be any writes to NTFS partition from Linux at all. If the size of the mailbox is exceeded, they could just throw an error at you when under Linux you attempt a write. Back in the day you wouldn't work with downloaded files larger than that day to day for sure, like what do you need, some Excel sheets, some PDFs.
I can think of a number of schemes which would use RAM to communicate data between Windows and Linux instances, but the advantage of passing the journal (the mailbox) via disk is that it would survive power loss.
This feels like a comp-sci PhD thesis project honestly. The level of Tom foolery going on is astoundingly impressive, and very late 2000s. Excellent video as always!
I'm 100% certain someone somewhere would fund an implementation of this for modern computers to swap between user-specified OSes. And I'd use it. This is incredible, this is exactly what I need in my life and this could still be a great feature on a modern desktop to replace dual booting.
I have no idea where "i don't think they should make laptops bigger than that" originated but it gets an audible chuckle from me every time
great video! crazy history aside, seeing you mess around in 2010-era Linux and Windows is intensely nostalgic
While I don't think they *shouldn't* make laptops bigger than that, I myself do always buy small laptops because I prioritize portability. If I'm using a laptop, I'm using it because I'm on the go. Otherwise I'd be on my fully decked out desktop.
@@tylisirnits a running gag for all laptop videos. see the recent video on the massive toshiba he says the same line.
i do appreciate how fucking scathing Gravis is when talking about us and himself and our use of free time and how incredibly true every single point he makes is
After some googling I am unable to find the song. Where is it from?
@@PanoptesDreams iirc he made it himself with a software synthesizer
@@PanoptesDreams yea, it's a song he made a few episodes back in some tracker software
@@gdtyra big sad. I like idle music.
After witnessing the horrors of that patent, Hyperspace is the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" of the computer world of that era
IDK it looks completely safe to me, if implemented competently. Which by all reason they did.
When you started explaining how the boot system worked I was sure it was all going to go over my head, but I was not only able to comprehend your excellent explanation of what was happening I was suitably horrified along with you.
I need to say this - I don't know how many times I've rewatched this in the past week. It's SO good. The hammer drop moment is so well crafted, it's like watching a real Eldritch horror movie or something. The skinwalkers are digital now!
Dual booting problem #4 is why I have a dual-boot setup between xubuntu and windows 10, and the last-modified time for anything on the windows 10 partition is 2018. Yep. I did all of that work thinking I'd need to boot windows on occasion to play a game or run something, but proton and virtualbox are basically good enough that I never have to do that.
There's one other weird value to Hyperspace - presentation-givers. Build your powerpoint presentation in windows, but then when you get to the place you're presenting, boot into the stable, bloatware-free, popup-free appliance mode and be certain nothing will screw up your show.
I'm not sure I have ever watched a computer history video that had a climax, but I had a smile on my face throughout the crescendo. Genuinely, an outstanding video. Bravo.
I've noticed a difference, as recent days progress, that you seem happier.
This was a very, very good example of that.
Thanks, for being good to yourself.
This is the Severance procedure, but for the computer. The OSM is that chip they put in your brain that splits your consciousness between work and home. Rebooting into the other makes the computer shiver like Adam Scott on the elevator as he goes to work or leaves to go home. It's just digital.
Yooo, this is the best comparison lol I just finished the first season. :D
As someone who just finished the first season, I hate how accurate you used it to describe this
i had the exact same thought lmao. poor CPU
ACPI: "Ooooookay, Windows -- it's time for a dance party!"
@@nickwallette6201 I wish I could like this multiple times.
Because of this series, I just wished every computer had the same music that played during boot up to provide a clean reference for how long things are taking - at the very least the longer the boot, the more FM jams you can have going on!
I’ll probably be hearing it in my head when I next boot my desktop
Part of my job is dealing with TPM and Secure Boot, and this is both beautiful and horrific. Brings to mind Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
Ugh TPMs can go suck a dick, they do nothing but just be annoying. They don't even really do anything useful security wise either cause windows doesn't even care if you swap your CPU ya just say no I don't care to fix bootlocker.
Love your focus on the mid and late 2000s. It's recent enough that not many people are nostalgic for it and far enough back to have huge differences worth exploring.
I can confirm the "phone apps vanish into the void when you minimize them" thing is confusing for old people, not just for apps but for mobile phone web browsers. Both my mother and grandfather have nearly 100 tabs in their browser and about 12 apps open every time I check their phones because they think the android home screen button serves the same function as the windows "X" icon
To be fair, android has figured out that this problem exists and has implemented a sort of 'suspend' feature that pauses apps that haven't been opened in a while.
As a nerdy non old person, i still have nearly 100 tabs open and dozens of apps running on my phone. It has 12 gb of ram though so it doesn't seem to affect it but its just quicker and easier to leave them open
@@JaredConnell You're disgusting Jared.
@@runed0s86 Yeah, as far as I understand you don't ever need to manually close apps on Android, and doing so doesn't really provide any benefit. I do it anyway, of course.
@@JaredConnellGlad I'm not the only one. Hell, now that evil browser devs gave us the ability to have tabs inside of tabs, the real number is best left hidden behind a smily face. Whatever obscure thing I looked up at 2AM 3 months ago is just too precious to clear. I'm not going to bother swiping all the way there to find out but I'm sure it's super important.
You said nothing major would change with you leaving your job, but man your editing is so much sharper in this video. It's obvious you've got a lot more enthusiasm and energy for this already.
the difference is noticeable indeed
Agreed - this is the job you were supposed to have.
1:05:27 Oh my freaking gosh! (Keeping it kid friendly…) I literally LMAO’d when you threw the USB drive on the floor after being disgusted by what the engineers had created! 😂
THIS is what I signed up for when I subscribed to this channel. THIS, is why you WILL SUCCEED in CONTINUING to delve further and FUTHER into this madness you call a UA-cam Channel! I’m signing up for your Patreon after I hit submit on this. Please oh PLEASE continue to make more content.
THANK YOU, for continuing to not only help me re-live my past IT life, but also for keeping me entertained for hours at a time. I’ve re-watched this at least 3 times and love it!
Fuck
Bro calm the fuck down
I love how the reaction of one of my friends (who linked me this video) was not something like "that's horrible" but:
> it is absolute madness
> I want to do it
Also, I'm pretty sure there exist other videos about phoenix's hyperspace tech.
some smallish corrections:
- Phoenix is still a big bios vendor to this day afaik (still selling BIOSes).
- From what I understand, the register saving is done by the kernel, and it simply tells the BIOS (through ACPI and probably SMM too) where to jump back in real mode.
- e820 is a shorthand for the bios function that fetches more memory map entries from the bios' internal table. What hyperspace (probably) does is it hooks that function to report another extra mapping at the very end. But when they boot to linux, you don't *need* the real e820 - when booting linux you can bullshit it's paramters directly, so just insert a different resreved region.
- Reserved regions are used for marking where bios puts its stuff, like if it had to allocate a framebuffer for ramfb or something i guess. You say where MMIO (i. e. most graphics stuff?) is by not marking that memory usable, usually. But reserved takes precenence over usable, so if it's usable, but also reserved, it's actually reserved and not in fact usable. And these entries can come in all sorts of orders etc. Because of course, sanity is optional when dealing with (possibly broken) BIOSes.
Ok
Phoenix's voodoo with Windows's Sleep function and Hyperspace is just perfect; as unnecessary and functionally useless it'd be for me and most other people, I would love to pull this party trick with one of my PCs to move between a couple different OSes. If this silly idea was further explored and refined, I wonder if it could be possible to copy the contents of RAM into a duplicate pagefile or some other file on the main drive and turn it into some nasty, pseudo-hibernate state that could be loaded back into RAM when swapping back. Better yet, since SSDs are now incredibly common, not to mention inexpensive, and hibernating and Win 10/11 quick boot take nothing to accomplish, if we could just hibernate Windows, boot into an alternative OS with full RAM and resources, and then pull what Hyperspace Dual does but with just a smidge less gaslighting to disk operations. I could imagine the possibilities with some of the Steam Deck, Aya Neo, and handheld PC crowd if someone amongst them takes inspiration to quickly swap between Windows and SteamOS.
Yeah, I was just thinking this.
With modern SSDs you could probably keep multiple OSes in hibernation and switch between them in seconds.
File systems might still be tricky though.
@@kargaroc386 you sure could, since using SSDs as swap files is used reliably on Linux to add more "RAM".
honestly, i feel that's the best possible reason for this video to even exist. to INSPIRE programmers with us now - programmers watching this and willing to take notes - to get to maybe figuring out if feats of this caliber are still possible and worth pursuing. programmers who can appreciate what's been accomplished here (not that gravis makes it difficult) and MAYBE get to work on reaching this level of batshit insanity for a goal that people might actually GIVE A SHIT about.
like, imagine if this curiosity were more commonplace among the it community. imagine where we could BE right now.
...so... are you maybe the one that's going to bring that imagination to reality, whoever you are?
@@razgar02 taht reeally depends on what we can do wioth the bios, which is now UEFI. In a way only phoenix could pull this off at the time because you can´t really changethe bios on your pc, at least in a non standardized way.
Maybe with the steam deck if valve sets us up with their own bios provider..or we intercept it and add our pwn stuff....and it works only because itś a single bios implementation
@@fluffy_tail4365 UEFI didn't replace ACPI, so this should still be possible.
wild speculation, but this really has the chaos energy of something designed by a former malware author, or at the very least inspired by the renaissance of BIOS rootkits starting circa 2006 (Bluepill, etc.). certainly makes a notable entry on that timeline imho
microsoft pushing secure boot with windows 8 might've shed eyes on this s3 script weakness if phoenix had tried to continue with it, but it wasn't until late 2014 that this was specifically identified as a vector for malware (bootkits) to modify protected flash storage and bypass UEFI secure boot persistently (see the "Darth Venamis" vulnerability presented at 31C3, or CVE-2014-8274)
haha, early rootkits was something that came to my mind as well cause it's kinda similar from the attack point of view.
Using dark, corrupted magic for wholesome nonsense
You forgot about Insyde BIOS.
I think the main reason for AMI BIOS being so popular on gaming boards is because the GUI can be easily customized by the manufacturer.
48:31 up until that point, I was having the strangest kind of dejavu. Like I was convinced that I've seen this exact video already months ago. But I couldn't find anything on UA-cam.
Now seeing that website, i remember a friend sharing that very article. Like bruh, I knew the style of dialogue, pacing, Humor all felt extremely familiar.
Just the mental equivalent of that one Leonardo DiCaprio Meme.
I survived the sleep shenanigans as I pretty much saw that coming. But after barely scraping by, enraged by the pure chaos, I was left in a vulnerable state. That’s when you brought up the file system, and my life flashed before my eyes and I said “oh god” out loud at my screen.
Fuckin yep. Absolutely masterful script. Goes into a tonne of detail on the sleep/ACPI shenanigans, primes you with what monstrosities these guys were capable of, just long enough to let you forget the NTFS stuff. And *only then* does he hit you with the absolute freight train of "so how hard d'you think this Eldritch Horror fucks with NTFS?".
@@Ariche2 What if it doesn't? What if it mailboxes all writes into the Linux partition and when Windows wakes up, it just replays that, making all writes to NTFS standard Windows NTFS writes. So let's say it won't allow you to download a multi gigabyte file from Linux to NTFS, it would error "out of space" - would you really be angry at a weird tortured kiosk Linux in mid 2000s?
Otherwise, they just need empty NTFS cluster search on Linux which is easy and an entry point in the Windows NTFS driver which works like "placement create", which i don't know whether that's a thing that exist, but i suspect it well may, but it's not exposed anywhere in the DDK headers i am almost sure.
@@SianaGearz Nope, forget about it. The entire reason the NTFS driver on Linux refuses to write any data to a disk that is still mounted by a suspended/hibernated Windows is that the Windows NTFS driver does neither reliably commit all of its internal filesystem state to disk when suspended or hibernated or invalidate that cache upon wake, and this is a major problem when Fast Boot means modern versions of Windows hibernate instead of shutting down by default. This means even read-only accesses to the disk are unsafe and can theoretically return corrupt data when accessed externally, like under Linux, but any issue will not be permanent assuming the on-disk data is not allowed to be modified, and Windows is allowed to restore from hibernation/suspend, or, assuming that state is lost, chkdsks the filesystem at a later time. The Linux NTFS driver has multiple mitigations in place to handle this scenario as best as reasonably possible.
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7 It seems there's an 180MB capacity overlay filesystem that is housed outside the NTFS partition and that accepts writes in place of NTFS. On Windows then a normal service process can apply the changes from the overlay to NTFS and empty the overlay.
@@SianaGearz Let's say, for the sake of argument, you save a document under Windows, but NTFS doesn't completely commit its contents in one go due to the writeback cache scheduler prioritizing some other file. Under Windows that file by all means and accounts appears to be fully saved, but in fact isn't yet, actually. Then you switch to Hyperspace and NTFS doesn't flush the data still lingering in memory, because afaik it never fully does this on suspend. Windows still expects that it maintains exclusive control over the drive and that it'll get the chance to finish all pending writes before anything bad happens. Half of that file may still be stuck in RAM under Windows, and Hyperspace boots up with that chunk of file still stuck in Windows limbo. Hyperspace has no way to retrieve this missing piece, and, depending on the Linux NTFS driver version used, no way to know there's a missing piece to begin with. Let's say now, that in Hyperspace, you copy that file to an external flash drive. You don't know it yet, but the copy of that file has a chunk of it that's missing and, due to preallocation, has been replaced with garbage.
Oh gee golly, turns out even read-only access to NTFS can break things if Windows doesn't completely unmount the drive before any other OS, including other installations of Windows, get their hands on it. Chkdsk and modern Linux NTFS can at least pick up journal inconsistencies and can just remove partial files from the file listing or throw I/O errors when you browse for them. This is also what the Windows NTFS driver does when it comes across file corruption. I don't know if Hyperspace's NTFS driver is this modern kind, though.
I also don't know if this is a scenario that can happen, because I don't know how the NTFS writeback cache works. But even if you knew, you shouldn't be relying on undocumented cache behavior that could change at any time, no matter what.
I actually wish this was possible with modern BIOSes, it would make dual-booting way less frustrating.
same but its like the dark magic of bios , like summoning a devil to boot in 2 seconds instead of 15
You can set up a dual-boot configuration that _also_ allows you to boot the same copy of Linux directly from its native partition, as a VM inside of Windows.
I used to do that on my desktop for a while. It was pretty glorious. This is probably the closest to this concept you can do on modern PCs.
Technically, there's not much stopping you from doing the same in the opposite direction, but that would surely mess up Windows' licensing/activation logic. This, and Windows isn't as seamless when reconfiguring itself for different hardware. So it's preferable to keep Windows native-only while having Linux available for both modes.
Also note: this is tricky (although likely possible) to configure on machines that shipped with the SSD configured for native 4K sectors. VM software generally has 512-byte sectors hardcoded, so you'd either need to reconfigure the NVMe namespace or do some shenanigans with additional fake partition tables... But on 512-byte sector drives it's pretty easy.
@@kFY514 Reading what you said, this is actually what I first thought Hyperspace was doing before the horrible discovery. When booted from startup launch as a regular OS, and when launched from the Windows icon run it as a VM (and do some extra Windows optimization magic to freeze everything else)
@@janlentan892 I'm not sure that's the case, actually. RAM "hotplugging" APIs exist now, albeit in the server space. Using those there's nothing stopping the system from just... stealing any unused memory pages from Windows and giving them to Linux, then doing the same in the other direction.
@@janlentan892 With 32Gb RAM or more on most modern desktops, that is no problem.
You made talk of ACPI and the sleep cycle on PCs enthralling. By the time you got to the "He gaslighted the OS!" line I was hooked, quite literally at the end of my seat.
I am more than impressed with the ACPI hack. It is fairly trivial and a standardized implementation exists to override ACPI tables at boot using grub or other mechanisms, but i'm at awe with their approach to this dual boot setup.
You know, in some ways it kinda reminds me of how multitasking was originally implemented in the original Mac OS, an operating system that wasn't designed at all for it.
(Even the desk accessory widgets were basically a hack, needed to be coded in a different way from regular apps and lived inside the app's memory)
Multitasking on the original Mac OS was just hacks upon hacks and its no wonder that they couldn't really wrangle it by the 90s, resulting in OS X.
This is such a cursed way of doing the switch trick, and it performs insultingly well. It's like arbitrary code execution, but by design. Everything about it is perverse and just wrong, yet it works perfectly well. Also, it looks like you've got much more energy and motivation to do these videos now that you can focus on this full time.
As someone who used to work on the desktop Linux stack I'm actually impressed that this appears to be using a hardware accelerated compositor for rendering desktop graphics, most likely Compiz. The dead giveaways are the animations - such as the folding screen effect for this RealPlayer window 21:00 - and the drop shadows for the Firefox menus. Even the simple fade-in for the browser. A hardware-accelerated full-screen application that renders the desktop and can apply 3D effects and postprocessing to 2D window contents was still a novel technology for Linux desktops in 2010, when many people were still using traditional X11 rendering for desktop apps. (I helped port Compiz to Solaris back in the day. Which also had a RealPlayer port, incidentally).
This one made me go "oh, no..." out loud as the pieces fell into place. Like when the character in the horror movie reaches for the wrong doorknob
I see what you mean now.
🏳⚧partyyyyy! ^.^ :3 Also you critters have cyoot avatars.
Oh, uhh... also, [something about the video] too, I guess
Ironic
My god... as a "programmer" whose mind is so blunt an instrument she mostly thinks in Assembly code.... this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. This is what doing computers is all about, to me. I am the witch who lives in your nightmares, and I aspire to the heights these wizards were capable of.
Do you write a lot of assembly?
Imagine being in the design meeting... "I have a crazy idea how to switch OS in under 20 seconds"
"And I have an idea how to write to a mounted NTFS partition"
*Thunder rumbles*
*Outside OS developers start gathering with pitchforks*
Nowadays if you have knowledge of assembly language, you're either someone who hacks games or malware for a living, or someone using it for low level OS & hardware development, and there's no in between.
I definitely wouldn’t call myself a programmer, but I have discovered I actually gel with assembly really well and always struggled with even the “simple” high level languages.
IE realising it really is just a tiny machine, memory addresses are just the literal binary of which select lines to pull high, everything is actually just bits and bytes shuttled between little single-operation units and waiting areas… it’s been really great.
Of course there’s no protection, but it was all the stuff about classes and types and structures which was ruining my ability to mentally conceive the process. Want a table? Make a literal table of values in the file. A string is just a list. Everything is structural and nothing is off limits.
So thankfully I understood the explanation here in the video, and just thought it was really clever! It’s the kind of stuff early BIOS/kernels did before even Disk Operating Systems became a necessity.
Cringe
What differs you from other retro tech channels is that you have the ability and will to go deep, bravely into the technical details and implementation. As a long time software developer this makes me happy to no end. And that dark magic, man that definitely is some computer dark magic. Or that is what the control of low level software can gives you - Unlimited Power or Godlike Power in computers.
I feel like the real meat of this video starts at around 45:00 . I love your understated commentary and dry jokes. Good stuff. I hope this video does really well and spreads this dangerous OS idea even further.
This is so unbelievably cursed, but I would pay good money to have this feature on a laptop. I ordered a Framework 16 for college (and hopefully to upgrade forever) and am planning on dual-booting Windows and Linux. Linux for personal stuff and Windows for any CAD software, etc. that truly only works under Windows. I'm sure I'll get something set up with grub where I can hibernate one and then reboot into the other, but if it could happen in seconds that would be awesome. I'd totally sacrifice half my ram, some security, and a goat for this setup. I'd never trust their shim for writing to the NTFS partition while in Linux though. I think the thing you overlooked when discussing the stability of that is a Windows update changing the order or rewriting the wake from sleep process, causing the shim to be skipped or worse, causing the existing shim to corrupt the partition. If I need more than read only access I'll just fully shutdown the Windows OS.
AMI dominates the high-end of the PC BIOS market but Insyde Software covers a lot of the more mainstream end (and devices like the Steam Deck) and Phoenix is still big in workstations and servers. But it's amazing to me how Phoenix has survived this long with the clown car management it's had.
I guess that's what happens when you have a company that never made anything important since 1984 but that one thing they made was so important that they still sell millions year after year. They don't even lift a finger and the dough keeps rolling in. I'd imagine that would breed some pretty braindead management.
Seriously I could imagine all the top positions being just crazy-rich people who just think of the company as a piggy bank and otherwise barely know why they're there, likely do any work they need to do over the phone from the beach, and any real work that gets done is outsourced.
There’s an interview with the founder of AMI kicking around, and when the interviewer asks him about how they black-box reverse engineered the IBM PC bios, it seemed to me that the the founder dude was caught off guard and answered a totally non-believable “oh yeah we totally black box reverse engineered it”, and when the interviewer asks about how they did it he basically says “yeah that’s um, yeah we totally did that ha ha next question”
Insyde was founded in 1998 from the old SystemSoft Corporation they bought up (they made primarily mobile BIOS since the 80s).
Fun fact: modern consumer Windows does actually run under a hypervisor by default. Pretty much all the hardware is passed through, but it is used for additional layer of malware protection.
This is also how Microsoft's virtualization solutions work in general. Hyper-V (also used by e.g. WSL2) is a type 1 hypervisor. When you enable it, it moves the "host" OS into a VM as well. It's special because it has direct hardware passthrough by default and it's able to manage the hypervisor, but it's still running _under it._ That's why until somewhat recently you couldn't use VirtualBox and WSL2 at the same time. Now you can, but VirtualBox doesn't run quite as well - because it has to utilize Microsoft's hypervisor instead of its own.
Yep, Microsoft's "virtualization-based security". Running the OS in a hypervisor isn't a bad idea, really, but you need to pass through the graphics card and some other things or do very fancy things to make it viable for something like this. Which I guess isn't what was happening with Hyperspace.
no it doesnt. core protection isnt enabled by default. its still native in most cases
This is your best video yet! You've struck a perfect balance between being genuinely informative and sassy.
this is possibly the best tech video ive ever seen on youtube. i love this channel. great work!!
I don't think this would be possible, but having an interview with the mastermind who came up with all this would for sure be a great topic.
I was watching this series hoping to find the "unicorn" solutions like this, something that is waaaaay overeingeneered to solve a problem that, as you said, doesn't exist in this case, and boy did you find a great one, masterful video!
It seems to me like the developers either really believed their work will bring great value to the world, or they knew it wouldn't do snot, but they decided to flex and have fun with it while they were paid to develop it.
i think he's absolutely right about the skunkworks thing. the chances of this being developed in a well-lit cubicle are basically zero. i hope the developers anthropomorphized the CPU as much as Gravis does, and wanted to make it suffer.
I never understood the other operating system thing. It's like a car salesman saying "Sorry this car's so slow. Here's a go cart to tool around your neighborhood to make up for it."
Honda did that in Japan. Some Van's included fold up Honda scooters. Transformers toys in G1 actually include them
You don't understand why someone would want to use 2 different OS on the same machine? Your analogy doesn't really make sense either, it's not like they provided it because they were embarrassed of windows.
@@JeffreyPiatt Yepp. Honda City and Motocompo. Funnily enough Motocompo is actually pretty good.
@@JeffreyPiatt | Yes, the Motocompo. The police procedural anime "You're Under Arrest" prominently featured one: ua-cam.com/users/shortsuaCWudMCuyc
It's more like "the engine in this car takes too long to start, here's a small electric motor that sits on the front axle to move your car" which is unironically something they do. I know that Mercedes supercar with the F1 engine is like that, and the BMW I8 is kinda like that
This is only vaguely related but the mention of Realplayer immediately teleported me back to this era. I worked doing tech support stuff at my university around this time and every semester we had to wipe all the classroom machines and slap a fresh image on, and we had to include Realplayer for YEARS after it made sense. No one knew which professor was requesting it or why, but we had to include it universally despite everyone in my department being kind of horrified. Anyway, yeah I’m shocked it was included here too. Amazing.
Also, great job on this series. I’ve been watching one like every night for the past few days and I feel like I’ve peered into some alternate history that was happening while I wasn’t paying attention, haha.
The previous video flashback edits have me laughing out loud for some reason. Love the little details. Great video keep ‘em coming!
Now that you've gone full time on UA-cam/Patreon, I can see this channel is slowly turning into a promo for your growing music career (love the tune, and that it's become a feature of your videos tbh)
I wonder if in future you'll be able to look to anything from present day hardware and find something so interesting and standout to talk about.
Wait that song is his?? I thought it was from a point and click game
Is that not a simcity tune? I was sure it was
@@LeeSmith-cf1vonope, he made it himself! Can't remember which episode in thi
@@Radiiiiiiiii he made another song that was revealed in an earlier video dedicated to a "keyboard pc" that he altered for specifically a music-making purpose (actually, it was revealed in a video on his alt account, but yeah). judging by that video, and the fact that the song throughout this series is made entirely with fm synthesis, it's safe to assume that this song is also gravis's.
@@greenphlem | Sounds like a track from Homestar Runner.
I think this would be a great gimmick for something like the Steam Deck. Then you could have your handheld-optimized Linux cake and eat your DRM or AntiCheat-laden one on WIndows as well:
Just have SteamOS standby, leave a nugget somewhere, flip the page, awaken Windows from its slumber, Steam reads the little nugget that was previously left behind, immediately starts up the game, you play, and when you quit, Windows goes back to sleep, flip the page, and SteamOS is back in charge.
Granted, things might get a bit trickier since you then need *twice* the memory for a gaming PC, but in theory, I think it could have merit.
It would require twice the ram to do that and still have the same performance. Because with this system it needs to have memory sectioned off to each other.
by using some memory hotplug api's from server/vm space, you could yank 10gig of ram out before you "suspend" and swap, and then the user just needs to close enough programs before switching, and now that ram can be handed off to the other OS
Please step away from the lathe of Heaven.
@@cleverca22I almost wonder if you could extend that with some extremely cursed code (i.e. a security nightmare): expose the sleeping OS A’s pages to OS B as owned by some dummy process, then provide a mechanism for OS B to swap them to disk…as long as they’re all put back afterwards.
Pretty sure you're basically describing a means of which a game could have its own OS bundled alongside as an emulation layer, for games that are just speshul enough to not run well (or at all, more likely) via Proton. Kinda like how some games on Steam right now are so old that they come with DOSBox preconfigured so it "just works."
I love how in-depth you go with this stuff. What a lovely little trick this machine pulled.
I was about to ask why people had been commenting before the video was out and then I remember what my patreon bill is supposed to be for. Always happy to support!
It's about 13 inches. I don't think they should even make laptops bigger than that.
It's about 11 inches. I don't think they should even make laptops bigger than that.
It's about 9 inches. I don't think they should even make laptops bigger than that.
It's about 7 in
I fell for the 13 inches version of this joke and bought a Thinkpad X390... and now I am a member of the thinkpad cult. I didn't know a computer could be this small, light and yet this good!
as someone who uses a thinkpad x100e, an 11" laptop is surprisingly useful for daily tasks!
It's about 7 inches. I don't think they should even make phones that big.
@@MyBlogsTV I kind of always went for 15.6 because they are the cheapest... and i have some 10" netbooks as well... but in hindsight i wish i gotten myself an MSI S262/S271 (12" barebone/DIY laptop, cast magnesium tub chassis) back in the day because it wouldn't have been much more initially and actually cheaper in the long run and so much nicer.
I'm 100% loving and admiring the sheer balls of the devs to pull a "demo-scene level" (as you said) scheme like this. This is stuff comparable to the legendary 8-, 16-bit Wild West hardware abuse of the old days... or comparable to the tales MVG tells about how some game consoles were cracked... I *love* they did it and how they did it, even though it was pointless. Tech sometimes is meant to be just crazy hacks. Thank you so much for placing the work of these people on the spotlight ❤
This was a really good presentation of something I had no idea somebody actually did. I enjoyed your style, subscribed!
I just found your channel for the first time. Great content and great presentation! I really enjoyed this video, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you've made!
"Obfuscated by B.E.E.R and P.A.R.T.I.E.S" is a hell of a sentence. Thank you for bringing this 𝑨𝑴𝑨𝒁𝑰𝑵𝑮 device to our attention.
Timestamp?
@@CyanoTex 1:06:30
"Everytime I've tried to dual boot it lasted the fist time I jumped in to Windows, to do something, and then went back to Linux afterwards and then go back to Windows again, not an hour later, after that I just stayed in Windows. And that's how that experiment ended. I have been doing this about once a year for over 20 years."
Far too relatable 😂
My first attempt at dual-booting ended in over a decade of being derided by family, for even trying out such a bad idea. 2 decades later, I dual-boot Win98SE and XP on some Athlon build; only to realize that even when 'properly executed' it ends up kinda pointless and inviting of problems. ie, a 'bad idea'.
Fun times...
@@labrat810 damn why did your family remember dual booting for over a decade and hate it that much
I was thinking exactly the same! Goddamn was that a relatable comment.
This dropped with such perfect timing, as if CRD knew I had just been called into work on a saturday evening...
Also I'm watching this on my Thinkpad X390 that I bought after I saw the X260 that CRD used in Episode 1 of this series, so there's another nice coincidence.
Also, absolutely love this series! I think your documenting of this technological history *is* a very important bit of work, and appreciate the heck out of it!!
I’m so glad I found this series of yours. This video in particular was just awesome!
this looks like something that happens when (passionate) engineers - with access to the deepest depths of the hardware, might I add - are told something can't be done... awesome video!
I loved the Cohost post about this, and have been eagerly awaiting the video since it was first promised. It did not disappoint. Thanks for everything you do!
I'm not sure when you started categorizing your content into shows but my brain absolutely loves it.
Your writing was incredible in this episode. I loved the horror writing!
ThinkFree was lighter and more compatible than Openoffice at the time.
Source: I was a big ThinkFree office user from maybe 2005-2011.
Computing in the Obama Years would be a great name for a series if it wasn't already named
Man this was such an amazing video, I'm do happy to have discovered your channel! The script is tight, the presentation is engaging and the topic is just wildly fascinating and unexpected! I'll be bringing your whole ass channel man, I love this genre of youtube that's like "some nerd tells you about some hyper-niche thing they are inexplicably passionate about for over an hour" and this vid is one of the best examples of that I've come across lately
you have the best videos i have come across, i find myself binging these videos for a week now and when economy gets stable again ill prob become a patreon for sure! tnx for this brilliant long videos and pls never stop :D
This video has permanently altered my brain chemistry. I now have hormonal imbalances. This has had a profound effect on my entire physical existence.
Bravo. Congrats. Absolutely beautiful.
Sooooo, about the idea of running a Hypervisor on every consumer machine ... Windows 11 is actually doing that now!
The keyword to look for is "(Hypervisor) Memory Integrity" or HVCI. As far as I know it uses a version of Hyper-V to run your Windows install in a special VM with full access to hardware and all that (the Hyper-V term for that VM is the not-at-all-confusing "root partition" - i believe that the Xen term for that would be dom0). This way the hypervisor can monitor the Windows kernel behavior, so that it can ring the alert in case the Kernel gets compromised by malware or similar. Sort of like a benevolent rootkit.
I think it's enabled by default on machines shipped with Windows 11.
The same basic architecture is also used to enable WSL2 (the Linux environment on Windows) - WSL2 is a highly customized VM running through Hyper-V, with the main Windows install running as the root partition, with almost no performance drawbacks. I think it's actually pretty neat!
It's worth noting, this is also done on the Xbox. VBS is actually back ported from the Xbox to Windows.
HVCI is cool but all hardware drivers have to support it so I've not been able to turn it on for any of my Windows 11 machines. On my main desktop there are no less than 15 drivers installed that are incompatible. This includes pretty much any A/V or TV capture and Proprietary HID drivers (e.g. Logitech Wheel)
Whilst this is true, remember that back when HyperSpace was in vogue, you didn't have SLAT or a number of other virtualisation things that we have now, so yes, virtualisation on a normal machine would've plain sucked.
Your channel is so freaking amazing, I'm so glad I found it!!!
THANK YOU!
Best instant OS I have seen so far on your channel. Well done Phoenix. I don't get why HP cut off it's arms and legs, and left it utterly useless.
That startup jingle is going to play in my head every time I start my computer now.
i can almost feel the history in that statement about ceos of unprofitable tech companies, because yeah, i’ve worked for a couple of those. those guys are out of their minds.
e: holy moly what the fuck
I love this series!
I commented on your last video about dells "Latitude ON" environment, in my quick research it used a 2nd ARM processor on board the motherboard to run an instant on environment and save power.
I need to find a factory restore image for my e6510 and try it out.
I learned a lot - thank you for being so thorough, genuine, unapologetic, and curious. Bravo!
4:00 The fact that apparently AMI is the only one left in the game makes me appreciate that I've heard nothing about them. Like scandals and such. Good work, AMI, keep on keeping on.
They actually did have a bit of a scandal: Can't remember who discovered it, but Partick from STH was reporting on how they noticed that the COA stickers on some servers (I think from HPE) actually said "AMERICAN MEGATRANDS", trAnds instead of trEnds.
Initially people thought that the vendors were being scammed (or were scamming themselves), the BIOS could've been unlicensed, and the supply chains were compromised. AMI's response was "oops our bad, those stickers are valid tho and will remain valid" which some people were taking as AMI rubber-stamping other people stealing their IP and make fake COA stickers that they would recognize as valid.
So yeah, that's the kind of weird controversies AMI gets into.
@@Fay7666I remember that, I’m pretty sure all it really is was a typo when AMI was telling their sticker vendor what the text should say.
When I saw Windows fade out, I knew what was happening was a switcheroo of the instruction pointer. The hell that Phoenix went through to gaslight the OS into thinking it was going to sleep was unthinkable.
This would be perfect with footage of a stage hypnotist performance where they appear to force an alleged audience member (aka a plant) on stage to fall asleep and wake back up as a chicken or something, and then fall back asleep and wake back up as their normal selves.
Always look forward to a new video from you, great job, as usual!
This is so incredibly wild and insane I gotta say hahah!
Thanks so much for sharing this whole thing with us I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of it!
I wonder if AMI’s canned DuOS-M project that allowed seamless switching between Windows and Android on Intel PCs was meant to be a trick like this…
This is utterly bonkers. What sick, twisted minds thought this up? Mad shenanigans. Love it.
I went to sleep 25 minutes before the end of the video so I resumed it now... just in time for the the talk about the sleep trick. And what a great place it was to come back to because that's where the true unholiness begins. CRD's presentation of this info is excellent :D
I had never thought learning about this era of computing nonsense would be such a rollercoaster of emotions but here we fuckign are. That was WILD. Thank you so much for compiling and sharing all this.
Oh how I love the "Old computers doing things slowly" theme tune
So Phoenix basically wrote and patented a pretty scary looking rootkit. Bravo guys.
Since HP was mentioned in the video, they tend to use InsydeH2O UEFIs. They trace their linage to SystemSoft, makers of PCMCIA driver stacks and BIOSes. So at least AMI doesn't have a complete monopoly. It goes to show that Phoenix really didn't pivot to UEFI and landed up losing a ton of market share as a result.
This delivered so much more than initially expected. This thing is nuts.
I was waiting for this one having already read the article on it. This is just such a crazy idea.