tag: #linux

A zombie process is already dead. kill minus nine does nothing to it. The fix is always one level up the process tree, because the bug is in the parent that failed to reap its child, never in the child itself.

The Linux kernel has had a written rule about commit hygiene since before the platforms most engineers use today existed. "Separate each logical change into a separate patch." The rule is currently being violated at an industrial scale by everyone using LLM assistants to write code, because the assistants produce sprawling multi-concern diffs by default. The kernel's discipline is the cleanest answer to the resulting mess, and it scales down to any project size.

A binary deleted from disk while the process is still running is not actually gone. The kernel keeps the inode alive as long as the process holds it, and /proc/PID/exe is a real readable handle to it. You can copy a running program out of /proc and reconstruct it on disk byte for byte.

Copy Fail, Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, ssh-keysign-pwn - four Linux kernel root exploits in three weeks. The kernel is fine. The admins are not.

The bash !$ history expansion substitutes the last argument of the previous command which turns destructive operations like rm into a two-step ritual where the first step is always a preview.

eBPF is the most interesting thing to happen to the Linux kernel in the last decade and one of the least understood.

Operating a homelab as an observant Jew raises questions that no modern operations manual addresses. Which jobs can run autonomously through Shabbat. Which alerts may wake me.

Production debugging is not a data-gathering problem but a reading problem, because most systems have already written down what is broken if you know where to look.

Brave Origin's architecture from a Nyxt user's perspective.

A 128 GB microSD started throwing ETIMEDOUT on writes. Instead of binning it, I used f3 to prove it wasn't counterfeit, then dd to force the FTL into remapping its bad blocks. The card has been healthy for two months since. A field-report on diagnosing and reviving flash storage on Linux