Leah Rowe has written an interesting article about the history of the Libreboot project on the project's 10th anniversary. Recommended reading if you're interested in the open source firmware ecosystem.
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If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
A common myth about USB keyboards is that they can only support 6-key rollover, and not report more than 6 keys being pressed at a time. In fact, this is wholly untrue; the USB HID device class can support full N-key rollover (NKRO). While keyboards which purport to support USB NKRO are now common, some of them have…
In Unix, everything is a file. This is often viewed as a positive, but it's often a poor abstraction for many things. This discussion goes into some of the issues.
When you invoke a function in an imperative programming language, you pass arguments to that function. But that function may also operate on global mutable state, meaning there are other factors in the operation of that function than merely the arguments you pass to it. To some extent this kind of contextual, implicit…