L2ARC is slowly populated from the older ends of the ARC, using a separate thread. Not all blocks aging out of the ARC are guaranteed to get to the L2ARC. This is to avoid slowdowns when the ARC is under pressure, and to allow for the use of cache vdevs on media which are slow to write but fast to read.

L2ARC vdevs are circular buffers.

Each L2ARC entry consumes at least 50 bytes from the ARC, and may consume considerably more. Those bytes are released ONLY after the circular buffer overwrites the L2ARC entry. Therefore a large L2ARC competes for ARC space with ordinary blocks, and the larger the L2ARC the more likely it is that the L2ARC contains stale blocks. Those stale blocks continue to use ARC space.

The L2ARC's big use is to avoid seeks to fetch occasionally-used data. It helps so little with streaming reads that data that was streamed (via prefetch mechanisms, for example) into the ARC are skipped by the thread that populates L2ARC vdevs. Defeating that (forcing the storage of streamed data) typically worsens performance of a pool.

The ZIL is automatically managed areas in storage vdevs in each pool. One can configure one or more separated log vdevs which will be used instead of the ZIL. When synchronous write calls are made, the data is stored in the slog (if available) or ZIL, and the call returns. No other data is written to the slog or ZIL. The blocks written out remain in the ARC, marked as dirty and in need of an asynchronous flush. When the open transaction group closes, the in-ARC copies of what went to the slog or ZIL is written out with everything else in the txg, and then the slog or ZIL is cleared.

Neither the slog nor the ZIL is read except during the import process; if they are non-empty at import, the blocks are written out (synchronously) to the pool's storage vdevs and then cleared.

"With the ZIL in a different drive (SSD or otherwise), you reduce the number of writes required"

The ZIL is the ZIL; the slog is the slog. If you have a slog you don't write to the ZIL, and whether that changes the number of writes of *synchronous* data is configuration-dependent. If you have mirrored slogs, for example, you are probably writing more than you would if you just used the ZIL.

In either case the idea is to write out synchonous blocks quickly and with as little writing latency as possible; writes are linear and are to areas at the start of the vdevs.

"Because you can generally write to a ZFS pool significantly faster than to a single disk"

Actually, it's the other way around, but hinges on what you mean by "write". The more disks there are in the pool the more labels have to be updated at the finalization of each txg. That's not a large extra amount to push out to the rotating material, but it's done synchronously and will *invariably* result in seeks to the start and end of each component device in each vdev in the pool.

Additionally, you can configure a single-disk pool, and there are reasons why you might want to do so, even though that is UNSAFE.

However, system calls return quickly because all writes go into the ARC, and asynchronous write calls can return immediately; synchronous write calls return when the data is committed to the ZIL or slog(s). In the case where there's a slog, write calls practically never initiate actual activity on the device(s) forming the storage vdev(s). Instead, writes will be triggered by timers.

For many workloads, this makes writes to pools seem very fast, since delayed writing allows for smarter scheduling, as well as coalescing of writes to specific physical blocks.

A bit more detail:

The ZIL and separated log (slog, "zpool add pool log ") are slightly different.

All writes of all varities go into the ARC.

From the ARC, synchronous writes are synchronously written to the slog (if one is available) and are then marked *asynchronous* writes.

When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are pushed out to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the slog is cleared.

If no slog is available, from the ARC synchronous writes are synchronously written into the ZIL (yes, ZFS intents log), which is automatically maintained at the start of one or more of the pool's storage vdevs, and then the blocks in the ARC are marked as *asynchronous* writes.

When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are written to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the ZIL is marked empty.

If on pool import the slog or ZIL is NOT empty then the blocks are written (synchronously) to the storage vdevs before the pool is made available for access.

So, the slog and ZIL are there to make synchronous write calls return quickly and safely. They aren't permanent storage.

The slog does not really need to be a fast drive, just one in which write latency is low; all writes to the slog are linear, so there should be almost no track-to-track seeking even in a rotating drive. It is vital that that slog does not lie about having committed data to stable storage (stable in the sense of persisting across crashes, powerfailures, etc.).

The ZIL lives in the drives that make up the pool's storage vdev(s), so there's nothing special about the ZIL.

The slog (and ZIL) are mostly felt when doing bursts of synchronous writes -- some POSIX operations do this (rm -r, for instance), some database operations do it too, but the case where slogs are most worthwhile is when NFS clients are doing lots of writes to the pool.

They are not write caches in the traditional sense. Their main use is to return quickly from synchronous write calls, without compromising pool consistency.

"Files" are a concept in the ZPL; the ARC doesn't even deal with DMU objects, it deals with blocks.

You could write a shim beneath the ZPL that maintains a system like you propose, but maintaining file-based caching info is going to eat into the memory available for the L1 ARC. You probably don't want that, really. The existence of the ARC (L1 and L2) is what masks residual latency involved in fragmentation not absorbed in write coalescing and spacemap scheduling, by enabling a place for read-ahead blocks to be cached.

The \mu characters above were eaten. Thanks, slashdot. :-(

The various time terms should be 30 microseconds or 10 microseconds.

1 TW * 30 microsecond = 30 MJ

30 MJ / 30 microsecond = 1 TW
30 MJ / 10 microsecond = 3 TW

This was a federal criminal case, and so was handled by a U.S. attorney and would have gone before a U.S. district court.

The judges and prosecutors in the U.S. district courts are not elected.

The investigation was lead by the FBI. The FBI is a wholly unelected agency.

The federal Executive is bound by statute, internal rules, and customs with respect to exercising control over the federal law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, and similarly is prevented from interfering in the activities of U.S. attorneys. The usual way of dealing with outright bad apples is not termination but promoting them to Alaska or Guam and hoping they refuse and resign. Firing U.S. attorneys, while often lawful, has led to wider government-crippling conflict among the various interested parties (the DoJ, the courts, the wider federal legal profession, and Congress (notably the Senate, which under the constitution must confirm the appointment of U.S. attorneys)).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy

Removing a federal judge requires an impeachment process involving both houses of Congress.

tl;dr: the notwithstanding clause is hard to use - a good litigator would probably still find the courts enforcing the rights in question, and using it "for real" is (in most cases unnecessarily) politically risky.

You are referring to section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That section [a] does not apply to the whole Charter (only to ss 2 and 7-15, although admittedly s 2(b) is the relevant freedom of expression clause, as noted in your parent article); [b] must be enacted by primary legislation; [c] that primary legislation must use specific wording ("declaration") explicitly invoking s 33; [d] the declaration expires no later than five years from its coming into force (and may expire sooner for several reasons, on the other hand further primary legislation can reset the expiration date); [e] the declaration is only valid under an appropriate Head of Power (i.e. it must conform with the ordinary Division of Powers, etc.).

The usual impediments to passing primary legislation apply, and in most of the legislatures, and in the federal Parliament, internal rules and general practice require a Royal Recommendation for legislation including a s.33 declaration -- that is, a government minister (or equivalent) must introduce the legislation with the backing of the cabinet (formally the Governor General in Council per 13 of the Consolidated Constitution Acts 1867-1982, or the provincial equivalents).

The use of the declaration does not shield the Act using it from the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960) which also has protections for freedom of expression; a remedy exists in the courts until and unless Parliament amends that Act. There may also be remedies for certain infringements under other statutes, such as the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977). Several provinces have similar "ordinary" legislation which are still in force and which offer various different protections for freedom of expression including remedies for interference by the provincial legislature or executive. Again these are not as entrenched as the Charter, but they also survive any use of s. 33 of the Charter, and most would have to be outright amended by the legislature, and brought into force *first*.

There are also much older protections for some forms of expression in force today in Canada; the Constitution as a whole has been found by the Supreme Court (and this is not surprising or controversial) to include the 19th or 20th century versions of such things as the English Bill of Rights (1689), or the Act of Settlement (1701), and the Quebec Act (1774), all of which may provide a cause of action even in the absence of the Charter protections and its modern statutory predecessors federally and provincially.

International obligations exist under treaty (and enabling or derivative statutes and regulations) that allow the courts to assess liability against the government for breaches of various rights of expression. Changing these would require primary legislation and may also require some advance notification to the other contracting parties.

Finally, there remain common law protections for freedom of expression related to concepts such as quiet enjoyment and public nuisance; people will generally resort to statutes which were written with the then state of case law in mind because they are simpler, more codified, and thus easier to deal with in litigation. However, even in the absence of statutory protections for various forms of freedom of expression, a good litigator is likely able to build a case that may persuade a Canadian judge to provide a requested remedy for some breach by the government. Indeed, this approach was very common prior to codified claims and grants of right, and did not entirely go away afterwards. There is no practical way for a government to avoid the possibility of courts finding against them for breaches of rights (even of uncodified ones) without destroying the independence of the judiciary.

The use of s 33 therefore [a] may not work with respect to shielding from judicial review of and remedies for actions by the legislature or executive; [b] is a huge political risk for which there is a democratic remedy preserved in ss. 3-6 of the Charter, which are not affected by s. 33; and [c] is a much less useful tool in general than the wording in s. 1, which is similar to that found in the French constitution or the European Convention on Human Rights treaty. The s. 1 wording is: "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society".

That is, a court may be persuaded that a breach of any of the rights guaranteed by the Charter was both lawful and reasonable (courts may also require some proportionality as well). That this is stated explicitly makes case law with respect to human rights much easier to use in litigation than similar case law in the U.S.A. where a similar general rule exists in case law but is not explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution or its Amendments. In both systems, case law bounds the general rules in more specific circumstances. [The ECHR treaty administration (the Council of Europe) tries to deal with the "subject only" rules on an article by article basis, keeping up-to-date with respect to case law in the European Court of Human Rights; the relevant wording wrt freedom of expression includes "subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others" (for some) and "subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." (there are others; this style of codification is a compromise suitable to the various systems of public law (French and German codes, English law, Scots law, etc.). The ECHR treaty also sets out grounds for derogations which operate similarly to the Canadian notwithstanding procedure; that moreover may be reviewed by either the ECHR court (in some cases) or the parliament of the Council of Europe (in all of them).]

A different analysis -- with better editing and more time put into it -- is here: http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/researchpublications/bp194-e.htm

Gage was not only no fool, he was also acting in accordance with the English Bill of Rights 1689 which said (in the late 18th century; the document has been amended several times and is still in force in much of the former British Empire):

[In the Articles of Complaint, deeming actions of the former monarch and his government unlawful]:

"Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom [...]
"By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law; [...]
"By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; [...]
"All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm;"

[The Parliament that brought about the Glorious Revolution declares]

"That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;
"That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law; ...
"That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void; ..."

[And the price for becoming the Constitutional Monarchs for William & Mary, and more importantly, the price for the Royalists in the coalition with the Parliamentarians that brought in the Glorious Revolution with its central idea that everyone should disband their private armies and argue things out in Parliament rather than fight things out in further civil war]:

"[...] the said declaration are the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed and taken to be; and that all and every the particulars aforesaid shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed as they are expressed in the said declaration, and all officers and ministers whatsoever shall serve their Majesties and their successors according to the same in all time to come."

Gage was an officer; he took his orders from ministers in practice, and they were drawn from and had to placate various factions in Parliament, including several flavours of Whig (the Foxites, most notably) who were very friendly with "American Revolutionaries" (to the point of forcing "kid glove" rules on what Gage and his superiors could do. Parliamentary micromanagement of the military was highly fashionable at the time, and it was frequently party political (see what happened to John Byng for instance)). Lord North, head of the government at Westminster (as "First Lord of the Treasury"; we would call him Prime Minister now) was keen on suppressing social turmoil in general, in England and in New England, and was certainly hostile to the what Europeans now call "subsidiarity" and no fan of grassroots democracy (this is in part because of his conflict with Londoners' electoral support for John Wilkes, whom he opposed and detested), but even he was bound by the (then) British Constitution, including the English Bill of Rights 1689. North had seen what Junius had done to his predecessor, and North had weaker support in the House of Commons.

However, North was good at persuading subordinates to try to interpret laws restricting the powers of the executive very narrowly when suitable. In the case of the gunpowder you mentioned, this led to frictions over jointly held stockpiles, especially those that could be accessed by non-subjects (there were quite a few in the Massachusetts Bay colony, including people who had fled from regions controlled by autocratic European tyrants and who readily accepted the idea promulgated by Charles James Fox and Benjamin Franklin (among others) that George III fit that role), or non-Protestants (ditto, and Gage was certainly aided by several anti-Catholic conspiracy theories in New England in the wake of the Quebec Act 1774's favourable terms for French-speaking Catholics in the former Nouvelle France). Several colonial legislatures and Parliament were also threatening to (ab)use the "by law" conditions in the Bill of Rights to disarm select individuals and an expansive reading of what constitutes a "standing army" to allow for a more general disarmament.

The groups stockpiling the powder did not view themselves as voluntary associations of private individuals. They functioned as de facto provisional governments with the authority to compel anyone to military service

I am not especially au fait with the thinking of all the groups involved, but I think it's fair to say they weren't very homogeneous, and I think your claim in the second sentence is a bit too strong. It seems unlikely that these groups could have compelled Loyalists to do much of anything in the early part of the revolution.

"The government of England is a government of law. We betray ourselves, we contradict the spirit of our laws, and we shake the whole system of English jurisprudence, whenever we entrust a discretionary power over the life, liberty, or fortune of the subject to any man, or set of men, whatsoever, upon a presumption that it will not be abused" -- Letter XLVI, Philo Junius to the Printer of the Public Advertiser, 25 May 1771.

Drat, that was clearly for the GP article.

The Royal Assent with respect to Westminster bills has generally been delegated to a commission since the 16th century (this was largely motivated by efficiency issues surrounding Henry VIII becoming the constitutional monarch of Ireland and by Henry VIII being more interested in sports and architecture, and with the fractiousness of English politics which was merely hidden for a while during his father's reign). The monarch personally participated in Royal Assent ceremonies only infrequently for major bills; the last time a monarch was personally involved in a Royal Assent was in 1854.

No bill becomes law until she's signed it

is therefore at least inaccurate.

It is not clear whether the Prime Minister can Advise the Lords Commissioners to withhold the Royal Assent in the United Kingdom. It is an enumerated power of the Executive in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, however, and has been used once or twice, although proclamation and/or bringing-into-force clauses in the Constitution and covering statute are the usual tools the Executive uses to avoid implementing the entirety of Acts of Parliament until it sees fit. In Westminster, Parliament regularly delegates the decision to bring into force parts of Acts of Parliament to government ministers, directly in the Act itself.

Also, the United Kingdom is now effectively a federal state, and one of the ways this `is reflected is in how the Royal Assent works with respect to bills originating in the assemblies for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The monarch has no personal authority in the enacting of bills passed by those bodies; the remedy for apparent conflicts with the Constitution is through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and the power to refer bills to the Supreme Court is vested in politicians responsible to the respective assemblies.

Bills passed by the National Assembly for Wales are confirmed by an Order-in-Council (in which the Queen or a Regent participates), however this will change to a system more like that of Scotland in light of the 2011 referendum on the extension of the Assembly's legislative competence.

Since Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales effectively allow their respective governments-of-the-day to stall the implementation of Assembly bills on narrow grounds, it is likely that the government in Westminster could do the same if it wanted (for instance, if a minority government were to be unable to stop the passage of a bill through the House of Commons and the House of Lords (where necessary)).

She should really have been including Charles in these meetings for the last 10 years

He has been a Privy Counsellor since 1977, and since his age of majority has acted as Prince Regent when the Queen has been unavailable. He is almost certainly as well briefed as he would like to be. Any differences in the advisory role between President Windsor and Vice-President Windsor is most likely attributable to personality and personal interests.

The most shocking part of the ruling is:

A person’s extradition to a Category 1 territory is barred by reason of extraneous considerations if (and only if) it
appears that:
(a) the Part 1 warrant issued in respect of him (though purporting to be issued on account of the
extradition offence) is in fact issued for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on
account of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political opinions, or
(b) if extradited he might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained or restricted in his
personal liberty by reason of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political
opinions.
This has been hinted at, but no evidence has been provided and the bar is neither argued nor found.

That Counsel for Mr Assange did not offer an argument or evidence in support of point (b) above is astonishing.
Unfortunately under the relevant rules of procedure, and given the broader workings of the adversarial system,
it seems that Assange's attorneys failed to engage directly with this part of the statute while Mr Assange himself
was saying in public that the prosecution was nakedly political and the punishment would be strongly influenced
to his detriment because of his politics.

The Administrative Court on appeal is entitled to consider an argument on that point even if it was not made in the District Court.
It may not be a terrible disadvantage if a weak argument on that point had been advanced and failed in front of the Chief Magistrate,
as his reasoning on the other arguments which failed in front of him is clear and compelling.

Finally, it is disappointing that the argument focused on technical deficiencies in the procedure that, if the Chief Magistrate had taken
a line opposite the "cosmopolitan" reading of the wording in the statute and Framework Decision, could be remedied simply by having
Ms Ny, or a colleague, immediately reissue a new EAW that would not have these deficiencies. I would think that a judge could
reasonably conclude (perhaps considering arguments from the parties) that requiring that remedy conflicts with
Crim P.R. Rule 1 (the Overriding Objective) and deliberately disregard "picayune" defects in an obviously purposeful and apparently lawfully made
EAW especially when the obvious remedy would quickly place Mr Assange in an effectively identical situation. In particular, I do not think
that autrefois acquit would or SHOULD apply in England or in Sweden if the present EAW were overturned because it identified Ms Ny as "the"
Director rather than "a" Director, or chose a negligibly broader Swedish term of art than the most exactingly precise equivalent to "prosecution".
I also do not believe Sweden would hesitate to reissue a corrected EAW. Consequently, it would be a poor use of resources to require the formality,
along the lines of trying to convince the Administrative Court to find for the appellant because of a macro expansion failure ("M a") or a typo ("Mr Hurtig in an unreliable witness").

I find myself wondering whether Mr Assange will continue using Mr Hurtig as his Swedish attorney (see the paragraphs starting with "10." and "15." in the ruling).

If the matter within the universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something. What is that something?

The matter in the universe is actually compacting because of gravitation. Most of the reason that matter has not compacted into black holes is that in the early universe the matter was much hotter, and thus components of matter had a lot of kinetic energy, which works against compaction. Ordinary matter readily collides with other ordinary matter (or photons) and the collision radiates away photons, so the matter loses kinetic energy in the process, and so tends to compact into bright dense blobs like stars. (Dark matter collides very rarely, and does not collide with or emit photons at all, so it still has lots of kinetic energy and thus spins in high orbits around massive structures like galaxies; in order to fall into the middle of the galaxy, that kinetic energy has to be lost, and whatever processes dark matter uses to get rid of kinetic energy are verrrry slow).

That is, most of the matter in the universe is in large gravitationally-bound structures. These structures are all moving away from one another, any observer looking at structures from his or her or its vantage point will see the distant structures receding faster than closer structures. The most obvious interpretation of this would be that empty space is being created between the big structures, but since the structures are not themselves expanding, empty space is not being created within the big structures.

In between all these large gravitationally-bound structures the gravitational potentials (which describe the direction things fall and how they appear to accelerate while falling, in the eyes of various observers) are very weak compared to the gravitational potentials near, or within, galaxies. Because it can be seen by certain observers to impart accelerations on objects, the gravitational field has an energy. Matter can receive energy from the gravitational field, and it can also donate energy back to it. (This is a generalized conservation rule in General Relativity), and the energy of the gravitational field is non-uniform. Whatever energy is causing empty space to appear works against gravitation. For example, if the empty space was not being created, the large structures would be closer together and so they would feel mutually steeper gravitational potential gradients -- that is, gravity would bring them ever closer together, merging them, and causing them to compact. That is, gravity would (from our viewpoint) accelerate big galactic clusters (including the one our galaxy is in) towards each other. However, we observe that clusters are accelerating away from one another instead, and that the acceleration is highly uniform with distance.

The simplest way to explain this is to posit an energy field with a small energy value at every point in space; the energy works against gravity by "unfolding" new space from something like a compact manifold. However, the energy value is small enough to be dwarfed by gravitational energy in stars, star systems, star clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters, superclusters, and possibly galactic filaments. So where there is lots of gravitational energy, like in these structures, you wouldn't notice new space appearing. In deep space far from massive structures, gravitational energy is so weak that this unknown (and "dark" as in "dark ages", which are poorly understood bits of history) energy does not suppress the "unfolding" of new space. So, lots of new space appears between galactic clusters. And that new space still has dark energy, so new space unfolds within the new (and empty) space. And so on. The result: exponential growth of the amount of empty space in the universe, all appearing far from big visible structures.

This is called the metric expansion of space because "unfolding" new space has a geometrical equivalence in increasing the number of coordinates, which in one dimension is equivalent to observing a ruler stretching and adding new marks (so a ten million light year ruler in deep deep intercluster space with ten marks on it becomes a twenty million light year ruler with twenty marks on it).

Also, in General Relativity there is a Lorentz contraction of rulers at lower gravitational potentials and a Lorentz expansion of rulers at higher ones, compared to an observer. If we put a ruler near a really massive and dense object it is at a lower gravitational potential, so the ruler would appear smaller to us than its exact duplicate sitting in our observatory; if we put a ruler outside our galaxy, it would appear longer than its exact duplicate here in our solar system. The new empty space that is "unfolding" is at an ever higher gravitational potential (if we put a particle in a volume of expanding space it would have further to fall than a particle we put much closer to the mass-energy the first particle wants to fall towards).

I hope this helps a little.

The balloon may be expanding, but it is expanding into the box/room/whatever. Your explanation simply says the balloon is expanding into itself.

What if you had a huge sheet of paper or tinfoil with enormous surface area and carefully folded it up so that it looked like an inflated balloon, and then added more air to the (pseudo)balloon? Rather than stretching like latex, the material would unfold. If your folds are really really tiny then you might not notice them or think about them until you want to explain why adding air to the (pseudo)balloon didn't rip the unstretchy paper or tinfoil, but instead caused it to appear to expand like an ordinary latex balloon. (Think of an accordion, maybe).

You can't say the matter in the universe was in a ball (metaphorically speaking) and then at some point it began to expand because it has to expand into something, not into itself. Further, what was that point of matter sitting in before it expanded? Was it sitting in emptiness? If so, what was that emptiness contained in?

We have good evidence that earlier in the universe's history the matter in it was in a very uniformly hot dense phase, and it has since cooled down and spread out at the largest scales. At smaller scales -- galaxies, stars, star systems, people, trees -- the matter has compacted, and there are wide variations in local temperature.

The (metaphorical) ball expanded because the "dark energy" and the kinetic energy of the hot matter overcame the forces that try to stick matter together, like gravitation, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Little overpressures and underpressures in the early universe led to structure formation and separation respectively. A brief period where the expansion force was very strong compared to the other forces can explain many things we see in the sky with respect to structure dynamics - formal descriptions of this are in the family of Cosmic Inflation conjectures, some of which is solid enough (in terms of consistency and in terms of correspondence with observation and experiment) to call "(incomplete) theory".

What was the early universe "in"? We don't know. Lots of physical cosmology theoreticians have speculated about that, but nobody has much of an idea about how to directly "see" anything older than the process that produced the cosmic microwave background radiation, and have focused on what earlier events would produce patternwise in the CMBR. Maybe some sets of possible "outside the universe" conjectures would produce definitely observable marks on the CMBR, or maybe we will find some other observational techniques. However, at the moment, we just don't know.