Running make -j32 to build a kernel on my new work workstation. Takes about a minute, in total silence.

@vilmibm people take it for granted now that you can just click on things, but it took decades for the idea to take hold & become ubiquitous. Most of it was utterly awful until the web came along.

RE: https://tiny.tilde.website/@vilmibm/115177383467463329

Interesting paper: "Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural Leaks"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/enter-exit-page-fault-leak-testing-isolation-boundaries-for-microarchitectural-leaks/

"We found 4 new cross-domain leaks, successfully detected all 6 known leaks possible in the configurations that we tested and reproduced 6 known flaws in patches."

e.g.:

"We discovered a microarchitectural effect on AMD3 that allows an attacker VM to selectively infer any bit from the memory of another VM, provided the victim VM has previously accessed (i.e., cached) this bit. By repeatedly exploiting this effect, the attacker VM could read the victim’s memory one bit at a time, and thus learn the contents of an arbitrary memory range used by the victim. "

📢 🐧 The videos from LSS-EU 🇪🇺 2025 in Amsterdam 🇳🇱 are now up!

📺 Here is the playlist:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6rSxIlgQx8OYw74Az63TpaB&si=6DEbDaY4GJMtIH1m

Learning KiCAD.



@kicad

4️⃣9️⃣ Here's the 49th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v258 release of systemd. #systemd258

One of the key features of systemd from day 1 on is socket activation, i.e. a mechanism where systemd binds sockets on behalf of services, watches them and only activates the services themselves later, possibly only at the moment they are actively used.

This has various benefits, for example reduces ahead of time cost of running a large number of services (which improves boot times).

📣 Reminder: Ticket prices go up in a few days for All Systems Go! 2025, the foundational user-space Linux technologies event in Berlin.
🎟️ Get yours today @ https://ti.to/all-systems-go/all-systems-go-2025
ℹ️ And more info @ https://all-systems-go.io/

LSS-EU kicks off today in Amsterdam, with conference chair Elena Reshetova presenting opening remarks.

https://lsseu2025.sched.com/list/simple

Where am I? Wrong answers welcome.

Got addicted to Severance on a recent flight, but I need to subscribe to 🍏 tv to see the full season now. This dystopia is getting very ~meta~

AI agents can potentially gain extensive access to user data, and even write or execute arbitrary code.

OpenAI Codex CLI uses #Landlock sandboxing to reduce the risk of buggy or malicious commands: https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/763

For now, it only blocks arbitrary file changes, but there’s room to strengthen protections further, and the ongoing rewrite in #Rust will help: https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/629

Landlock is designed for exactly this kind of use case, providing unprivileged and flexible access control.

@root42 Berlin is full of surprises.

RE: https://metapixl.com/p/root42/856229543832290223

Anyone using Claude for kernel / system level development? How do you make the most of it?
I like the idea of having something which can do deep code review - eg. does this code actually do what I specified? Are there any bugs? Obviously - but also not so obviously in a complex system. Have I broken layering abstractions? Is the code maintainable? What does the maintainer of this subsystem expect? Etc.

Excellent news yesterday, the #CHERIoT RTOS paper was accepted at SOSP!

Huge thanks to @hle, who led on rewriting the rejected submission and made numerous improvements to the implementation.

We now have CHERIoT papers in top architecture and OS venues, I guess security and networking are the next places to aim for!

#CHERI

Dear journalists writing about AI being the end of programming as a profession:

Programming has a long history of embracing tools that make things more productive. The manual for the STANTEC ZEBRA explains that a limitation of 150 instructions is not a practical problem because no one could possibly write a working program that complex. Today, we routinely write programs several three orders of magnitude more complex than that in an afternoon. Higher-level languages have increased programmer productivity by literal orders of magnitude. Things like integrated debugging environments, reliable autocompletion, higher-level type systems, and so on have all been embraced because they let you solve the problems faster.

Note that they don’t all let you write more code quickly. Most of the improvements in productivity have had the opposite impact. They don’t let you write code faster, they let you write less code to do the same things. This started with libraries of reusable code and simple abstractions like functions and has grown over time. I can write a simple dynamic web page in a couple of lines of PHP, where doing the same thing in the assembly languages that the ZEBRA folks were talking about would require me to write thousands of lines. The PHP version would be more portable and also vastly easier to adapt to changing requirements.

At the same time, there are far more problems that need programs to solve them than there are people who can write programs. If programmer productivity doubled tomorrow, there would not be enough programmers. If people who can’t program were all suddenly able to program at the level of a first-year undergraduate tomorrow, there would still not be enough programmers. And that’s why our industry puts so much effort into end-user programming languages. That’s why the most successful programming language, with over a billion users, is Microsoft Excel.

With all that in mind, don’t you think that the fact that most programmers need mandates from management to use bullshit generators to ‘help’ programming might be an indication that the hype isn’t all it claims to be?

More details about the Gaussfest in London on the 7th September

https://www.extremeelectronics.co.uk/the-gaussfest/

High voltage, tesla coils, electrostatic machines and another Victorian/Edwardian pumping station to look around.

and a chance of seeing a working mercury rectifier.

I can't think of a better day out :)

📣 The schedule for All Systems Go! 2025 is now live. https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/schedule/
🗣️ We look forward to hear from all the great speakers on Sept 30th-Oct. 1st.
🎟️ Grab your tickets to join in: https://ti.to/all-systems-go/all-systems-go-2025
ℹ️ Get more info here: https://all-systems-go.io/

Tapping stainless steel with a small diameter bit is a little stressful 😬

Published 3D print & model files for a mounting bracket for the Leo Bodnar mini GPSDO device. These are commonly used in VHF+ amateur communications as 10 MHz references for use with timing-critical weak signal modes and for frequency-locking microwave & mmwave equipment.

I'm using the CERN-OHL-W license, which seems best for design files.

https://github.com/xjamesmorris/bodnar-gpsdo-mount

#electronics #hamradio #amateurradio #osh

I do have a bunch of HV capacitors of uncertain vintage if anyone in the UK has a fun use for them.