Very interesting contribution to the FreeBSD hackers mailing list. Gives quite a good background about Rust, C++ and safety. Debunks a few claims you can easily hear in many places as if they were common knowledge.
Very interesting exploration of the design choices behind the creation of a key value storage engine.
Funny reverse engineering of the latest SteamOS to use it in a different context. Give some information on their system design.
Ever wondered how ELF and ld.so work? This is a good primer on the topic with a few OpenBSD specifics.
Interesting subtle differences between gzip and Python expectations which leads to a tough integration bug to find.
OK, I admit I missed the introduction of this flag in strace as well. Super interesting, it can definitely be useful.
Another system where it becomes easier to make drivers in Rust.
I didn't read it since it's basically a whole book. Still from the outline it looks like a very good resource for beginners or to dog deeper on some lower level topics.
Interesting way to approximate how loaded a system is.
Nice article explaining unikernels and showing the example of MirageOS.
A good reminder on how the "five why" are just a starting pont. For proper investigation and risk management you need to go deeper.
Can't say I learned much but that was a very neat refresher. It's very well done, so if you never dabbled in the basics of how the hardware or the kernel work I strongly recommend reading it.
Definitely this, what matters most is being able to change previous decisions. In comparison each decision itself is less important.
This rings true to me. What a messy path to get better at our craft!
Indeed, it's important for architects to get their "hands dirty". Organizations where it's not the case prevent their architects to challenge their assumptions pushing them to stay in their ivory tower. It's a good way for bad decisions to pile up over time.
Like it or not, this is definitely filling a very unique niche. It's a very good fit for system software where safety is important and available time limited. There is no better option for now.
Very interesting piece. Goes in length about the UNIX history and the evolution of POSIX. It also highlight its limitations and where the design needs to evolve.
In the end, this is a nice conversation about language design...
OK, it's 2022 and this is still not an adequate ecosystem for system programming.
Excellent deepdive about pipes, on the path to optimization we see how perf is used, how memory is managed by the kernel etc. Very thorough.