I eat systems for breakfast
Regardless of how one might feel about patches-over-email software development, the reality is that a lot of exciting open source projects are developed on mailing lists. Configuring a pleasant plaintext-oriented e-mail environment may not be obvious for those of us who come from a primarily git forge style background. At least, it wasn’t for me. …
Check out the changes locally For everything but the most trivial of patches, check change out locally. Not only is this a technical prerequisite for some of the other tips in this article, but I’ve found it is easier to remain focused on the review when it takes place outside of my email inbox/GitHub/Gitlab/etc. Use …
I normally don’t make any fanfare for one of my weekend projects, but I ended up having a lot of fun with this one, so what the hell. I’m happy to announce that Popple v1.1.0 has been tagged. Popple is a karma bot for Discord that I wrote as a way to gain some more …
I am pleased to announce that sevctl will be available in the Fedora repositories starting with Fedora 34. Fedora is the first distribution to include sevctl in its repositories 🎉. sevctl is an administrative utility for managing the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) platform, which is available on AMD’s EPYC processors. It makes many routine …
Do you ever get frustrated with waiting for a heavy VM image to download or with installing operating systems onto virtual machines manually? It can start to feel cumbersome after a while, especially if you bring up and tear down lots of virtual machines as part of your workflow. It’d be nice if spawning a …
Don’t you love it when your compiler thinks hard so you don’t have to? Rust’s built-in static analysis is praised for providing all kinds of safety guarantees for your code. Today, it’s not about your code, or even my code; it’s about how calling Linux ioctls through a type-safe abstraction layer exposed a bug in …
Hacktoberfest 2020 had a rocky start. I’m not here to argue against any of the criticisms brought up by other members of the community. Their feedback is not unfounded. However, I don’t believe it was all bad. I signed one of my weekend projects up for Hacktoberfest to gain some more experience in a maintainer …
A while back, I participated in a software engineering capstone with a group of other computer science students to complete my degree. Our project was to create a from-scratch implementation of grsecurity’s “randstruct” GCC plugin for the Clang compiler. Long story short, we ended up sending out a request for comments (RFC) on the initial …
Have you ever wondered how Linux knows what PCI devices are plugged in? How does Linux know what driver to associate with the device when it detects it? In short, here’s what happens: During the kernel’s init process (init/main.c), various subsystems are brought up according to their “init levels.” Among these early subsystems are the …
It is sometimes hard to see past the thick haze of caution surrounding the use of C Preprocessor macros in your code. Indeed, the dangers of Macromancy are well-stated in many corners of the internet. You would do well to heed them. However, there are times where a judicious use of macros can help reduce …