Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,949 posts.
It's 2020. Quarantines are everywhere – and here I'm writing about one, too. But this quarantine is of a different kind. In this article I'll describe the Linux Kernel Heap Quarantine that I developed for mitigating kernel use-after-free exploitation.
If there’s one thing to know about distributed systems, it’s that they have to be designed with the expectation of failure. It’s also safe to say that most software these days is, in some form, distributed—whether it’s a database, mobile app, or enterprise SaaS. If you have two different processes talking to each…
Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed). This article investigates the process of creating and using…
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
(TL;DR: rr from git can record and replay 64-bit programs. Try it for yourself !)
Hello everybody, I hope you’ve been enjoying this summer after two years of Covid and lockdowns :D In this post I’m going to describe how to use eBPF syscall t…
This is the last post I plan to do on parsing LLVM’s bitcode, at least for a while. I’ll keep working on the various libraries that I’ve started under the mollusc umbrella, but they won’t be accompanied by regular posts anymore — I’d like to refocus on writing smaller, less dense (read: lower-pressure) posts for a…
This post discusses monitoring and tuning the Linux networking stack in great detail with the focus on sending data.
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voices which say FreeBSD is dead, Linux is the way to go. Most of the time those voices are trolls, or people which do not really know what FreeBSD has to offer. Sometimes those voices wear blinders, they only see their
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Recent incident where Uber car was involved in an accident where a cyclist got killed has sparked many comments and opinions. Many blame…
Retrocomputing and other indulgences
In this post, we will discuss the challenges of programming with locks and how the C++ language offers some useful tools to make it easier. We will start with an example in C and then use C++ to improve upon it in steps. The example APIs are based on real-life APIs from the SerenityOS kernel.
For many years, Mozilla has continued to provide Firefox for 32-bit Linux systems long after most other browsers and operating systems ended support. We made this choice because we care ...
If it’s so easy to uninstall a troublesome RSR, why can’t we simply roll back to a previous version of macOS, like we did in High Sierra?
In this post, CrowdStrike's Engineering team walks through one possible way of adapting a library to handle OOM events without aborting the process.
About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes.That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes [...]
LUMI is the first pre-exascale supercomputer of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and is now Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. It will be inaugurated on Monday 13 June 2022 in Kajaani. LUMI offers European researchers a world-class tool for understanding complicated phenomena, such as climate change. LUMI serves as a…
With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.
We are proud to announce the official release of Fedora 22, the community-driven and community-built operating system now available in Cloud, Server, and Workstation editions. If that’s all you need to hear, jump over to Get Fedora to download — or for current users, run the upgrade tool. In addition to the latest…
If you’ve been unable to create a bootable external disk to use with your M1 Mac, this explains what you need and its limitations and quirks.
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.
Json parsing in C using function pointers attached to a struct
I have recently released an open source tool called sotrace . It maps out the .so dependencies for a binary or library, and presents th...
