This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.
On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.
Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.
The off-the-shelf player in this space (structured red-team search) is probably https://github.com/usestrix/strix (no affiliation). But any frontier model, if you tell it "here's how the authentication system works, go looking for bugs" will probably do a good job.
It's barely more expensive than a direct function call but, not so you'd notice unless it's in a hot loop. At which point the lack of cross-language inlining is your real problem.
This is all true but is a somewhat Java-flavoured perspective i.e. generations ties you into a moving collector, which ties you into barriers and complicates FFI, which is not always the right tradeoff.
A non-fragmenting allocator goes a long way to alleviating the need for compactions too.
Long time Ars reader, looking forward to your article (and have a few DOS games to reverse in mind already)!
Is this with a Ghidra MCP or some other technique? And why two models - did you try using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for everything? (Or 27B or a bigger model since you have the RAM for it)
I'm running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on a very ordinary desktop PC (32GB DDR5, 8GB Radeon 6600XT) and getting a useful 15-20 tok/sec out of it. The MoE architecture and auto offloading from system to VRAM is just fantastic. Unsloth Q4_K_XL.
The Qwen3.6-27B is unbearably slow as it doesn't fit in VRAM, though, i think the MoE is very easy to run.
It is also extremely nice that you can just `apt install llama.cpp libggml0-backend-vulkan` now too.
People say this a lot about Linux and it somewhat rubs me the wrong way - sure, the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Likewise (OK, ever since libc5/glibc2 changeover in 2001) the Linux binary should work if you have its library dependencies (SDLv1 it looks like?). So what's really the problem? Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? "DLL Hell" was a thing too.
I didn't see any binary downloads for Linux on that website, only source code.
I gave it a try anyway, the dependencies were actually not a problem for me, Debian has libsdl-{net,image}1.2-dev, libglew-dev, and so on, and if your distro does not have SDLv1 there is libsdl1.2-compat. But after the dependencies, there was a problem with the source code doing something involving bitfield packing that does not compile on x86_64.
I do see the source code has lived on, i can `apt install d2x-rebirth` on Debian 13 which has a comment about https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ ...is that helpful?
I was pleasantly surprised to learn the architecture for this - a minimal backend that does a PAM auth and gives you a shell over websocket, with only your own Linux user credentials - and then everything else (from managing files to apache to VMs) is done in frontend javascript.
Keeps the server-side backend minimal and auditable.
Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.
Spare-time projects wind up here: https://code.ivysaur.me/