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Unix as a tool forge and how Emacs fits in Unix philosophy
Wikipedia cites a few different sources on what “Unix Philosophy” is. Peter Salus summarizes it as:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 582 posts.
92
Maps and Memory Leaks in Go
A map can always grow in memory; it never shrinks. Hence, if it leads to some memory issues, you can try different options.
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How to make sure no dynamic memory is used
How to disable heap (dynamic memory allocation) in an embedded application? This article goes into the details of linker files and how to detect dynamic memory allocation.
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Migrate from Linux to FreeBSD
Easily migrate from Linux to FreeBSD. Explore key differences, insights, and useful tricks to adapt seamlessly between the two systems.
95
Galois field instructions on 2021 CPUs
CPUs like to operate on data types such as uint8_t , uint16_t , uint32_t , and uint64_t . These data types can be viewed as integers modulo 2 8 , 2 16 , 2 32 , and 2 64 respectively. Addition and multiplication can be defined on these integers modulo 2 N in a way which is familiar to most people; for example, in…
96
Home truths about macOS
True or false? Apple supports macOS for three years. Apple’s security updates are sufficient. New versions of macOS are full of bugs. It’s safer to delay upgrading.
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The Linux scheduler: A decade of wasted cores (2016)
The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores – Lozi et al. 2016 This is the first in a series of papers from EuroSys 2016. There are three strands here: first of all, there’s some grea…
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Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
Microsoft is increasingly standardizing on its in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution. Is this Microsoft Linux?
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Linux boot partitions and how to set them up
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
100
Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'. I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box…
101
Comparing TCP and QUIC
There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms…
102
Cache Associativity
Consider a strided incrementing loop over an array of size $N=2^{21}$ with a fixed step size of 256:
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9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, and MNT Reform. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.
104
If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, try four
Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workst...
105
Linker, can you spare a meg? (2021)
Tailscale on iOS runs as a special kind of app, a Network Extension. This lets us run in the background, so we can secure traffic from all of your applications, without them having to change anything. But with this power comes a memory straightjacket. Normal iOS apps can use 5GB or so of memory before iOS kills them…
106
Compilers and IRs: LLVM IR, SPIR-V, and MLIR
Overall discussion on compilers and IRs (LLVM IR, SPIR-V, and MLIR): why they are in their current manner and how they would evolve
107
The Talos II, Blackbird POWER9 systems support tagged memory
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…
108
Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator
Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection.
109
Linux 6.1 on NanoPi R4S – On fixing SD-card support, Heisenbugs and Rabbit Holes
This little ARM64 single-board computer dragged me into the world of device trees, voltage regulators, and one of the worst Heisenbugs I encountered so far.
110
Bringing a dynamic environment to C: My linker project
I'm writing a linker. It's an unusual linker. It's focus is not on producing executable files. Instead, its focus is to facilitate rapid iteration on a program without having to re-link or re-open it after making changes. It is hot-loading of code at an object-file granularity.
111
Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy. Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth…
112
Towards the next generation of XNU memory safety: kalloc_type
Improving software memory safety is a key security objective for engineering teams across the industry. Here we begin a journey into the XNU kernel at the core of iOS and explore the intricate work our engineering teams have done to harden the memory allocator and make our software much more difficult to exploit.
113
Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
114
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
115
Brave New Trusted Boot World
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Multi-Kernel Drifting
Using truss, dtrace & ctfconvert to figure out a faulty illumos kernel module.
118
Rust in the Linux Kernel: Just the Beginning
Support for using Rust in the Linux Kernel was recently merged by Linus Torvalds. This is important because Rust is memory safe, meaning that code written in Rust does not suffer from things like buffer overflows, use-after-free, and other memory management vulnerabilities that plague software written in unsafe…
119
How the clipboard works
Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious.
120
The cult of dd (2017)
You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century.