#FOSSY2026 Picolibc - a C library for embedded systems - Keith Packard
https://2026.fossy.ca/schedule/presentation/384/

Building an embedded C library. Why? AltOS 8051 moved to ARM. Newlib too large. Some AltOS targets have only 4kB RAM. Malloc is unacceptable in safety-critical systems. Partially derived from AVR stdio (made POSIX 2018/C23), newlib math. Small as practical, bounded recursion, don't rely on a file system. -Werror or bust. Enable -fanalyzer (storage leaks, unbalanced locking). Own ubsan implementation (just trap). Use symbol attributes (nonnull, format, etc.) So many tests. Every change needs a test. More test code than source code. Linux syscall layer for x86 and arm.

#FOSSY2026 KCFI Comes to GCC: Code-Reuse Defenses for the Linux Kernel - Kees Cook
https://2026.fossy.ca/schedule/presentation/390/

Stop any redirection of code (reusing existing code) with indirect function calls. Forward edge. What are the expected targets for indirect function calls. Must have same prototype. Put hash of prototype before function. Crash course on GCC internals. Front end adds -fsanitize=kcfi. itanium c++ mangling, hashed. RTL wrapper for new type of 'CALL". inline handling. 4 backend arches, i386 (x86_64), aarch64, arm, riscv. Half code is regression testing. Fun bug for cross call merging. Create "KCFI check and call" RTL instruction. Hard to get review across the entire series. But looks like all parts have gotten reviews now. Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger.

WATCH: If you’re interested in turning streets for cars into places for people, aka “pedestrian streets” (a VERY limiting term), watch (and share) my new podcast interview with the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement area, which I’ve been advising lately.

Discusses Vancouver’s pedestrianized Granville Street that I’ve been helping with, but relevant to ANY city. And once you’ve watched it, come out and visit Granville Street! https://youtu.be/5Yi1wW3e8N8?si=Bup3GGhbEB76G5s0

I'm not sure if I can blame AI for this one...

LLVM Bay Area Monthly Meetup (Mon Aug 10 ‘26 6pm)

https://discourse.llvm.org/t/llvm-bay-area-monthly-meetup-mon-aug-10-26-6pm/91486

So Fediverse, last week I was laid off by my employer, Elastic, as part of a wider reorg that made my position redundant. 7% of the global workforce was impacted, so I'm not alone in this 😢

I would appreciate boosts as I'm now looking for my next job. Preferably in community open source, but with the crazy market, a mortage and a baby I appreciate any lead.
I'm a backend engineer with strong #cloudinfrastructure , #devops and #observability skills. I spent the last 5 years working with Golang, but have previous experience with Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript (that shows how old I am I guess).
I'm searching remotely from Italy.

Thank you!

#FediHire #fedihire_europe #fedihire_it

@wren6991 and on the jump thing: you're probably right, there's historically been a ton of issues around C-type instructions where we accept stuff we shouldn't and just do something arbitrary -- that's true in binutils, but if you start looking closely you'll see it in hardware too.

Again something to fix, it's probably another trivial bug somewhere. It's really just a lack of review/testing, again there's just too many sub-targets to try and get everything up to a good quality bar.

@wren6991 most things don't need to be trivial anymore, they can just be DCO like normal projects.

@wren6991 ya, probably. I don't think anyone's really looking at the C sub-extensions all that closely -- or really any of the non-server stuff in general, that's where the vast majority of the upstream effort ended up going over the past few years. The embedded platforms tend to be a mess of vendor-specific extensions, it's just too chaotic for us to do a good job.

So if you file a GCC missed-optimization bug this will probably get fixed, but I'd expect there's a ton more of this kind of stuff floating around.

FWIW I think we should move away from the assembler tricks, but that's kind of a different discussion...

I have evidence that bots are now solving anubis difficulty 5. Unfortunately, at difficulty 6 the site becomes usable only to extremely patient people...

Found a good way to attach a 3D-printed gear to a motor shaft. Timing pulleys are cheap and come apart pretty easily! #FreecadFriday

We're going to be hiring someone to work on CHERIoT software things soon. Full remote, but UK Only (for various funding purposes, we need more people in the UK). Happy to talk to junior people who have some C/C++/Rust experience. You'll initially be mostly writing C++, though we expect this to move to more Rust over the next year or so.

Some of the job will be driver development gruntwork (here is a datasheet, here is a software interface for this device class, please write a driver for the device that exposes the interface), some will be at a higher level of the stack (so, how do you design a secure, compartmentalised {something} stack?).

If these sound interesting, let me know!

EDIT: The hiring manager is going to be out for the next couple of weeks, so I'll probably be a bit slow to set up interviews / respond. If you see this in a week or two, don't assume you're too late!

#GetFediHired #CHERIoT

"Cars can be weapons, and the ubiquity of guns and cars in our society means a single crazy person is always going to be able to do huge amounts of damage if they want to. The only way to stop that is to limit them, which nobody in power seems to want to do."

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/08/02/summer-bummer-annual-car-free-street-event-squeezed-in-nypd-overkill

@wren6991 we have a bugzilla

@floooh I’ll happily co-sign less code in more time.

One of the really scary things all the LLM discourse is showing is just how many people think more code is the goal.

We’ve done this as an industry before. Every big tech company has had a “pay per line” and “pay per bug” phase. Ask anyone who’s been around a while how well that went. (Hint: It’s never gone well.)

But now we have companies saying “buy our thing and you can have more code faster!” and half the industry is salivating at the idea. “Just think of what we’ll be able to do with all that code!” 🙄

"Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam."

https://www.404media.co/google-earths-new-ai-lets-anyone-fabricate-completely-bullshit-satellite-images/

Waaaaa! Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 registrations are open! /me types madly. Done, registered, see you in Prague in October :-)

Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 registration open

https://lwn.net/Articles/1084938/ #LWN #Linux #LPC

A friend’s dad was hit by a driver while riding in the bike lane. He’s a local musical legend who rode his 1973 Schwinn around Santa Monica daily. He’s recovering from brain surgery and multiple fractures. Please share if you can. I wish this kind of thing were already designed out of our streets. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-stan-heal

Local stratum 1 GPS NTP time server, yay!

Now to see how it copes with sun and rain. The bag is an extra precaution. Tracking 36 satellites and using 19, over three networks.

Current PPS tracking with σ=16ns

Current jitter measured at FireBrick (NTP client) of 0.08ms, and latency of 0.7ms. Selected over any pool (via Internet) servers, understandably.

PoE

#PCB #ESP32 #GPS #NTP