junior dev: can you please give me an example of useful comments in my code?

Me: sure, good comments look like this ⤵️

huh, systemd-run is really neat, you can do stuff like:
$ systemd-run --user -S -p MemoryHigh=1000M -p MemoryMax=1100M
and get a shell inside which you can't use more than around 1G of RAM (but can use more swap)?

Ich bin so alt, ich kenne A.I. ja noch unter dem Namen Eliza.

Baby octopus lurking around

We really need to start pushing the truth about AI.

The easiest job for AI to replace would be Management.

Uses the most resources, while offering the least amount of actual productivity.

Reads something by some idiot on the internet, and bases their Management Style around it.

Makes decisions without context.

I think many people misunderstand the purpose of code review. The purpose of code review is not for the reviewer to find bugs, and certainly not for them to ensure that the code is bug-free. Anyone who depends on code review to find bugs is living in a fool's paradise. As everyone should know by now, it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code.

The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be _hard to maintain_. The reviewer looks at the code and tries to understand what it is doing and how. If they can't, that means it will be hard to maintain in the future, and should be fixed now, while the original author is still familiar with it.

today I learned that there is a company that sells "agentless" Linux EDR. you might wonder what it means to do EDR without an agent.
apparently "agentless" means "instead of installing a daemon that runs in the background, one super-uber-privileged server will periodically ssh into all your Linux boxes as root, drop executable files in a temporary folder, run those executable files to run a detection pass, and wipe itself from the system again".
See this diagram from their documentation:

— "Can you believe how stupid and primitive the ancient Greeks were? When they didn't know something, they asked an oracle, and they believed whatever it said!"
— "That's nuts. Where was this oracle?"
— "No idea. Let's go ask ChatGPT."

(gdb) c
Continuing.
Recursive internal problem.

Time to take a break, I guess…

Today I finally carved out some time to implement return value capture for the Linux kernel function tracer. As of 6.17-rc1, this is done via the HAVE_FUNCTION_GRAPH_FREGS architecture feature. On ARM32, that basically means stashing function call specific registers in pt_regs inside the ftrace arch code.

Once I wrapped my head around the intended semantics, it came together surprisingly smoothly.

Then I enabled the ftrace self-test… and hit this splat:

[    3.299111] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[    3.299173] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1 at kernel/trace/trace.c:2215 run_tracer_selftest+0x110/0x148
[    3.299441] Modules linked in:
[    3.299725] CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 6.17.0-rc1-gd7ee5bdce789 #141 NONE 
[    3.299806] Hardware name: Generic DT based system
[    3.299887] Call trace: 
[    3.299932]  unwind_backtrace from show_stack+0x18/0x1c
[    3.299987]  show_stack from dump_stack_lvl+0x54/0x68
[    3.299999]  dump_stack_lvl from __warn+0x88/0x12c
[    3.300013]  __warn from warn_slowpath_fmt+0x194/0x19c
[    3.300026]  warn_slowpath_fmt from run_tracer_selftest+0x110/0x148
[    3.300039]  run_tracer_selftest from register_tracer+0x11c/0x1cc
[    3.300054]  register_tracer from do_one_initcall+0x60/0x210
[    3.300066]  do_one_initcall from kernel_init_freeable+0x1d4/0x240
[    3.300079]  kernel_init_freeable from kernel_init+0x20/0x140
[    3.300091]  kernel_init from ret_from_fork+0x14/0x28
[    3.300131] Exception stack(0xe080dfb0 to 0xe080dff8)
[    3.300204] dfa0:                                     00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
[    3.300217] dfc0: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
[    3.300224] dfe0: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000013 00000000
[    3.300282] ---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

I double- and triple-checked my changes, still no clue. Then it dawned on me: the test fails even without any of my patches. 🫠

2012: "Secure boot is a plot by Microsoft to kill Linux"
2025: EA's insistence on invasive anti-cheat results in a bunch of Windows users managing to get their secure boot configuration into a state where their GPUs no longer work and there's no recovery path: https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/1miaynl/secure_boot_megathread_guide_community_support/

Microsoft would have to be *very* bad at this for a plot to have backfired this badly

I am so enjoying watching #ai brogrammers crying in their designer water bottles as upgraded #ai models take their carefully crafted prompt and outputs totally different bollocks to the last one so they can't tweak their app any more.

It's enough pain for real programmers handling tool upgrades to tweak their work and re-run test suites but for the AI lot it's carnage.

• Step 1: While debugging a kernel issue, you want the return value of a function at startup.

• Step 2: Instead of just adding a printk() and recompiling, you try tracing like the cool kids.

• Step 3: Since 2023, the function graph tracer can show return values. You add to the kernel command line and reboot: ftrace=function_graph ftrace_filter=interesting_fn trace_options=funcgraph-retval

• Step 4: The trace shows no return value. You find that ARM return value capture exists only for AArch64, not ARM32.

• Step 5: You add a printk() and rebuild.

(disclaimer: i did not create this, but also could not find who created it)

Urgent help for OpenPrinting needed!

As many here know, I am co-founder and lead of OpenPrinting since 2001, known as the print guru for Linux and free software by many. I also got one of the 8 fellows of the Linux Foundation for this.

Up to now I was working at Canonical, hired back in 2006 just to run OpenPrinting and also to maintain printing-related Ubuntu packages.

... 🧵

Please boost.

#OpenPrinting #LinuxFoundation #getfedihired