Linux and FreeBSD: BPF, Faking 'Trust', and rsync
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The extensible scheduler class
It was only a matter of time before somebody tried to bring BPF to the kernel's CPU scheduler. At the end of January, Tejun Heo posted the second revision of a 30-part patch series, co-written with David Vernet, Josh Don, and Barret Rhoden, that does just that. There are clearly interesting things that could be done by deferring scheduling decisions to a BPF program, but it may take some work to sell this idea to the development community as a whole.
The core idea behind BPF is that it allows programs to be loaded into the kernel from user space at run time; using BPF for scheduling has the potential to enable significantly different scheduling behavior than is seen in Linux systems now. The idea of "pluggable" schedulers is not new; it came up in this 2004 discussion of yet another doomed patch series from Con Kolivas, for example. At that time, the idea of pluggable schedulers was strongly rejected; only by focusing energy on a single scheduler, it was argued, could the development community find a way to satisfy all workloads without filling the kernel with a confusion of special-purpose schedulers.
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A proposed threat model for confidential computing [Ed: Linux getting infected by fake "privacy" for the clown computing ploy]
The field of confidential computing is still in its infancy, to the point where it lacks a clear, agreed, and established problem description. Elena Reshetova and Andi Kleen from Intel recently started the conversation by sharing their view of a potential threat model in the form of this document, which is specific to the Intel Trust Domain Extension (TDX) on Linux, but which is intended to be applicable to other confidential-computing solutions as well. The resulting conversation showed that there is some ground to be covered to achieve a consensus on the model in the community.
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rsync(1) on FreeBSD with a modern Walkman
One of the primary draws to a modern Walkman is that it presents as a generic storage device, meaning my FreeBSD tower can now act as a media hub, rather than relying on dedicated software like iTunes or Apple Music.