Hacker News with Generative AI: Kernel Development

Some __nonstring__ Turbulence (lwn.net)
New compiler releases often bring with them new warnings; those warnings are usually welcome, since they help developers find problems before they turn into nasty bugs. Adapting to new warnings can also create disruption in the development process, though, especially when an important developer upgrades to a new compiler at an unfortunate time. This is just the scenario that played out with the 6.15-rc3 kernel release and the implementation of -Wunterminated-string-initialization in GCC 15.

Programming, C++, Compilers, Kernel Development

124 points by jwilk 22 hours ago | 93 comments

NT Synchronization Primitive Driver (kernel.org)
This page documents the user-space API for the ntsync driver.

Operating Systems, Kernel Development, Drivers

21 points by doener 30 days ago | 0 comments

Capability Analysis for the Kernel (lwn.net)
One of the advantages of the Rust type system is its ability to encapsulate requirements about the state of the program in the type system; often, this state includes which locks must be held to be able to carry out specific operations.

Programming, Kernel Development, Security

14 points by signa11 36 days ago | 0 comments

Damon Self-Tuned Memory Tiering Shows Nice Improvement for Linux Servers (phoronix.com)
Linux developer SeongJae Park has posted a set of patches for the Linux kernel's wonderful DAMON code to provide for self-tuned memory tiering that "just works" and is racking up some nice performance wins.

Linux, Memory Management, Performance Optimization, Kernel Development

5 points by rbanffy 37 days ago | 0 comments

When eBPF pt_regs reads return garbage on the latest Linux kernels, blame Fred (tanelpoder.com)
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the bottom of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code.

Linux Kernel, Kernel Development, x86_64, eBPF, Security

105 points by tanelpoder 56 days ago | 11 comments

Linux Introducing a Standardized Way of Informing User-Space over Hung GPUs (phoronix.com)
The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to finally introduce a standardized way of informing user-space of GPUs becoming hung or otherwise unresponsive.

Linux, Kernel Development, GPUs, Software, Operating Systems

11 points by mfiguiere 64 days ago | 0 comments

Greg Kroah-Hartman Makes Compelling Case for Kernel Drivers Be Written in Rust (phoronix.com)
Greg KH makes the case that the vast majority of the kernel bugs are due to "stupid little corner cases in C that are totally gone in Rust."

Programming Languages, Kernel Development, Linux

27 points by LinuxBender 65 days ago | 2 comments

Linux 6.15 to Bring More Improvements to DRM Panic "Screen of Death" (phoronix.com)
Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March.

Linux, Operating Systems, Kernel Development, Open Source, DRM

4 points by LorenDB 73 days ago | 0 comments

Linux 6.14 with Rust: "We Are Almost at the 'Write a Real Driver in Rust Now" (phoronix.com)
With the Linux 6.13 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman described the level of Rust support as a "tipping point" for Rust drivers with more of the Rust infrastructure having been merged. Now for the Linux 6.14 kernel, Greg describes the state of the Rust driver possibilities as "almost at the "write a real driver in rust" stage now, depending on what you want to do."

Linux, Rust, Programming Languages, Kernel Development, Open Source

11 points by ksec 87 days ago | 0 comments

Running NetBSD 10.1 on a 1998 Toshiba laptop (idatum.net)
Here are my notes on running NetBSD 10.1 on my first personal laptop that I still keep, a 1998 i586 Toshiba Satellite Pro with 81Mb of RAM and a 1Gb IBM 2.5" IDE HD. In summary, the latest NetBSD runs well on this old hardware using an IDE to CF adapter and several changes to the i386 GENERIC kernel.

Operating Systems, Retro Computing, Hardware, Kernel Development

20 points by idatum 120 days ago | 1 comments

Coccinelle (kernel.org)
Coccinelle is a tool for pattern matching and text transformation that has many uses in kernel development, including the application of complex, tree-wide patches and detection of problematic programming patterns.

Kernel Development, Programming Tools, Software, Open Source

24 points by josephcsible 121 days ago | 4 comments

Linux 6.13 will report the number of hung tasks since boot (phoronix.com)
Linux 6.13 Will Report The Number Of Hung Tasks Since Boot

Linux, Operating Systems, Kernel Development

128 points by LinuxBender 153 days ago | 32 comments

The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019) (irenezhang.net)
After chatting with people at HotOS, I was inspired to write this blog post summarizing my HotOS paper. At a high-level, the HotOS paper advocates for a new high-level I/O abstraction for kernel-bypass.

Operating Systems, Kernel Development, I/O Abstraction

61 points by eventhelix 155 days ago | 36 comments

Bounded Flexible Arrays in C (kernel.org)
Large projects written in C, especially those written close to the hardware layer like Linux, have long treated the language as a high-level assembler.

C, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Kernel Development, Memory Management

12 points by fanf2 176 days ago | 0 comments

Fitting a Forth in 512 bytes (2021) (compilercrim.es)
Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just downloading it.

Programming Languages, Software, Compilers, Kernel Development

92 points by whereistimbo 182 days ago | 22 comments

Rust in enterprise kernels (lwn.net)
At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit, it was generally agreed that the Rust experiment would continue, and that the path was clear for more Rust code to enter the kernel.

Rust, Operating Systems, Kernel Development

62 points by bookstore-romeo 184 days ago | 10 comments

FFI type mismatches in Rust for Linux (lwn.net)
At Kangrejos, Gary Guo wanted to discuss three problems with the way Rust and C code in the kernel interact: mismatched types, too many type casts, and the overhead of helper functions.

Rust, Linux, Programming Languages, Kernel Development

6 points by todsacerdoti 196 days ago | 0 comments

Linus Torvalds is fed up with bcachefs (kernel.org)
Several more filesystems repaired, thank you to the users who have been providing testing. The snapshots + unlinked fixes on top of this are posted here:

Linux, Kernel Development, File Systems

37 points by ramon156 201 days ago | 10 comments

What's new with io_uring in 6.11 and 6.12 (github.com/axboe)
What's new with io_uring in 6.11 and 6.12

Operating Systems, Linux, Kernel Development, Networking

21 points by mfiguiere 204 days ago | 6 comments

Booting into Rust and deadlocking right away – a gnarly bug in my hobby kernel (jannestimm.com)
After adding the few lines of code to parse the fdt and obtain amount of cores and memory, I reran the kernel and observed my kmain function getting stuck right at the point of locking the global KMEM (line 22), the physical page allocator (which needs to know the amount of memory to initialize the datastructure that records all the free pages).

Operating Systems, Rust, Programming, Kernel Development, Debugging

6 points by jannesan 207 days ago | 0 comments

Linux 6.12 Features Super Real-Time, Sched_ext, Intel Xe2 and Pi 5 (phoronix.com)
The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. There's real-time PREEMPT_RT finally in mainline, the much anticipated sched_ext code also was merged, QR codes for DRM panic messages, initial out-of-the-box support for Intel Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake and Battlemage, initial Raspberry Pi 5 support, and a ton of other hardware support additions and new innovative kernel software features.

Linux, Kernel Development, Hardware, Graphics, Raspberry Pi

92 points by rbanffy 208 days ago | 39 comments

CrowdStrike's Blue Screen blunder: Could eBPF have saved the day? (theregister.com)
"Interview The CrowdStrike chaos was caused by software running riot in the Windows kernel after an update tripped up the code. eBPF is a useful tool for kernel tracing and observability, but could it have mitigated the CrowdStrike incident?"

Cybersecurity, Software Bugs, Operating Systems, Kernel Development

4 points by LinuxBender 211 days ago | 0 comments

Committing to Rust in the Kernel (lwn.net)
The project to enable the writing of kernel code in Rust has been underway for several years, and each kernel release includes more Rust code.

Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Kernel Development

208 points by todsacerdoti 213 days ago | 170 comments

Linux Close to Enabling Real-Time "Preempt_rt" Support (phoronix.com)
We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support.

Linux, Kernel Development

6 points by l0b0 228 days ago | 1 comments

Retiring from the Rust for Linux Project – Wedson Almeida Filho (kernel.org)

Rust, Linux, Open Source, Kernel Development, Software

86 points by todsacerdoti 240 days ago | 98 comments

Offload-friendly network encryption in the kernel (lwn.net)

Network Security, Kernel Development, Linux

5 points by signa11 281 days ago | 0 comments

Create Unified Kernel Image from Scratch (izissise.net)

Kernel Development, Linux, Operating Systems

19 points by todsacerdoti 284 days ago | 1 comments

Fiwix: Unix-like kernel for the i386 architecture (github.com/mikaku)

Operating Systems, Kernel Development, i386 Architecture

108 points by ingve 298 days ago | 35 comments

Kernel developer write a USB driver in 3h for Apple Xserve front-panel [video] (youtube.com)