bcachefs is, on technical merit, the most interesting copy-on-write filesystem to arrive on Linux in a decade. It is also, as of Linux 6.18, no longer in the kernel, ejected after a governance dispute between its author and Linus Torvalds and now shipping as a DKMS module like ZFS. This is the story of a filesystem whose engineering and whose politics point in opposite directions, and what that means for anyone deciding whether to run it.
tag: #kernel
5 posts
eBPF is the most interesting thing to happen to the Linux kernel in the last decade and one of the least understood.
1 year ago
Address Space Translation
Demystifying address space translation for Linux and OS geeks
1 year ago
Base and Bound Protection
Exploring base and bound memory protection
A race in mm/gup.c lets any local user write to read-only memory and rewrite setuid binaries. It sat in the kernel for nine years. Here is how the race actually works, and why "it's only local" was always a lie, especially now that everyone runs containers.