Just arrived. Need to find a good place in the office.

Bootloaders are fun. 😬

https://sigma-star.at/blog/2025/01/filesystem-vulnerabilities-in-bootloaders-a-hidden-risk-for-verified-boot-mechanisms/

Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Reinstalled my laptop and upgraded to KDE Plasma 6. After a while, I noticed that mail search in KMail no longer works. Reading Akonadi logs revealed this gem. I’m no Akonadi expert, but creating an SQL statement with 40k variables does not seem wise to me. Guess how many mails I have in my inbox?

org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Handler exception when handling command FetchItems on 
connection  akonadi_indexing_agent (0x56536e3d9e50) : Failed to query database
org.kde.pim.akonadi_indexer_agent: Failed to fetch items:  "Failed to query database"
org.kde.pim.akonadi_indexer_agent: Indexing failed:  ""
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: DATABASE ERROR while PREPARING QUERY:
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver:   Error code: "1"
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver:   DB error:  "too many SQL variables"
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver:   Error text: "too many SQL variables Unable to execute statement"
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver:   Query: "SELECT DISTINCT ResourceTable.name FROM
PimItemTable  LEFT JOIN CollectionTable ON ( PimItemTable.collectionId = CollectionTable.id )
 LEFT JOIN ResourceTable ON ( CollectionTable.resourceId = ResourceTable.id ) WHERE (
PimItemTable.id IN ( :0, :1, :2, :3, :4, :5, :6, :7, :8, :9, :10, :11, :12, :13,
 :14, :15, :16, :17, :18,  :19, :20, :21, :22, :23, :24, :25, :26, :27, :28, 
:29, :30, :31, :32, :33, :34, :35, :36, :37, :38, :39, :40, :41, :42, :43, 
:44, :45, :46, :47, :48, :49, :50, :51, :52, :53, :54, :55, :56, :57, :58,
:59, :60, :61, :62, :63, :64, :65, :66, :67, :68, :69, :70, :71, :72,
...
...MANY...MORE...
...
:44273, :44274, :44275, :44276, :44277, :44278, :44279, :44280, :44281, :44282, :44283, 
:44284, :44285, :44286, :44287, :44288, :44289, :44290, :44291, :44292, :44293, :44294, 
:44295, :44296, :44297, :44298, :44299, :44300 ) )"
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Handler exception when handling command FetchItems on
 connection akonadi_indexing_agent (0x56536e3d9e50) : Failed to query database
org.kde.pim.akonadi_indexer_agent: Failed to fetch items:  "Failed to query database"

Having reasonably large mailboxes is no longer a thing, is it? 😞

Edit: Broke lines.

Judging from the absolutely packed out rust sessions I went to at LPC and the very positive support from senior people including especially @gregkh it is super clear to me that rust is here to stay in the kernel and a big part of its future.

Have offered to help (or at least be cc'd in hopes I have time for it :) on mm binding stuff fwiw from the kernel side.

And also I really do have to sit down with rust finally... Maybe advent of code this year...

🐧

it's fine September ~ Vienna edition.
#climatecrisis #vienna #oida

This "untrusted data" patch series from Benno Lossin is the result of conversations at last weekend's Rust Linux kernel conference in Copenhagen:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240913112643.542914-1-benno.lossin@proton.me/

It's not a "silver bullet" for why we should be using rust in the Linux kernel, but it is a "big giant sledgehammer" to help squash and prevent from happening MANY common types of kernel vulnerabilities and bugs (remember, "all input is evil!" and this change forces you to always be aware of that, which is something that C in the kernel does not.)

I had always felt that Rust was the future for what we need to do in Linux, but now I'm sure, because if we can do stuff like this, with no overhead involved (it's all checked at build time), then we would be foolish not to give it a real try.

And yes, I've asked for this for years from the C developers, and maybe we can also do it there, but it's not obvious how and no one has come up with a way to do so. Maybe now they will have some more incentive :)

I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.

https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5

Me, when I start explaining DMARC, DKIM and how they work with mailing lists.

I'll try to post here more often. Let's start with a brick stone tux I built this afternoon.
Moc credit: https://www.t-reichling.de/de/mocs_littletux.shtml

Hello, world!