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How to modernize C arrays for greater memory safety: a case-study in refactoring the Linux kernel and a look to the future Kees Cook C is not just a fancy assembler any more 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. Using C allowed for abstracting away much of the difficulty of writing dir

We are discussing and working toward adding the language Rust as a second implementation language in the Linux kernel. A year ago Jake Edge made an excellent summary of the discussions so far on Rust for the Linux kernel and we (or rather Miguel and Wedson) have made further progress since then. For the record I think this is overall a good idea and worth a try. I wanted to add some background tha

My previous article on how the kernel decompresses generated a lot of traffic and commentary, much to my surprise. I suppose that this may be because musings of this kind fill the same niche as the original Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code which was a major hit in the late 1970s. Operating system developers simply like to read expanded code comments, which is what this is. W

How the ARM32 Linux kernel decompressesAugust 12, 2020 ARM traditionally uses compressed kernels. This is done for two major reasons: It saves space on the flash memory or other storage media holding the kernel, and memory is money. For example for the Gemini platform that I work on, the vmlinux uncompressed kernel is 11.8 MB while the compressed zImage is a mere 4.8 MB, we save more than 50% It i

When evaluating networking for a host the focus is typically on latency, throughput or packets per second (pps) to see the maximum load a system can handle for a given configuration. While those are important and often telling metrics, results for such benchmarks do not tell you the impact processing those packets has on the workloads running on that system. This post looks at the cost of networki

kdevops: a devops framework for Linux kernel developmentAugust 16, 2019 I'm announcing the release of kdevops which aims at making setting up and testing the Linux kernel for any project as easy as possible. Note that setting up testing for a subsystem and testing a subsystem are two separate operations, however we strive for both. This is not a new test framework, it allows you to use existing fr