Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 30, 2025,
updated May 30, 2025

• Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Mediocregopher ☛ No One Can Stop You From Making a Toy VM

      There was no real goal here, except to practice a bit for an upcoming technical interview. I remembered vaguely how to do this sort of thing from college, but it wasn't until I sat down to try it again that I realized something:

      Making a toy VM is really fucking easy, and you can do it too. I'll walk you through all the required pieces here, and link you to my implementation so you can see how it looks in practice. Mine is in rust, but you could use any language really. Let's do it!

    • Slashdot ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Linux 6.16 Adds 'X86_NATIVE_CPU' Option To Optimize Your Kernel Build

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • [Old] Rachel ☛ Another feed reader score roundup

      Hello again from the land of feed reader behavioral tests. I ran through the list of participants a couple of days ago and wrote up my results. This is only for those which had polled at least once in the past seven days relative to that point.

      I'm going to group some of these together, but keep in mind that some behaviors are a function of however the user configures the program. Also, at this point I'm mostly focusing on their steady-state behavior, but any previously-reported goofiness at subscribe-time is still worthy of fixing for people so inclined.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Turso ☛ We rewrote large parts of our API in Go using AI: we are now ready to handle one billion databases

      Before diving into the technical problems, it's worth explaining our technology choices. Our full rewrite of SQLite, which is quickly gaining steam, is written in Rust. Our massively multi-tenant server that serves the SQLite databases is also written in Rust. But we decided to write our API layer—the part that handles all the platform management—in Go.

      Writing our API in Go achieves two main goals: [...]

  • Education

    • APNIC ☛ Towards a more inclusive Internet in Nepal

      The program held two sessions. The first featured inauguration, introductions, and a panel discussion with more than 100 in-person attendees, 50 Zoom participants, and 150 livestream viewers, including APNIC elected leaders from Nepal. Speakers included: [...]

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Talking about the internet in Salvador, Bahia ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      I’m in Salvador (BA) participating in the 15th Internet Forum in Brazil, FIB15. I came to present a new interview podcast (in pt_BR), Nós da Internet, and to fix a personal flaw: never having participated in a FIB before.

      Here, I had the privilege of interviewing people who built and continue to build the Brazilian internet. And in a big fashion: in a beautiful aquarium-studio set up in the middle of the convention center. The one in the picture above.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Federal News Network ☛ The Army’s Unified Network Plan 2.0: A shift toward data-centric security and open standards

      The Army’s Unified Network Plan 2.0 (AUNP 2.0) represents a pivotal transformation in military networking and cybersecurity. [...] For this shift to be successful, the Army must embrace open security standards that enable interoperability while maintaining strict control over sensitive data. Proprietary, closed security architectures create vendor lock-in, limit flexibility and introduce dependencies that can become liabilities in an evolving threat landscape. An open, standards-based approach ensures that security controls remain adaptable, scalable and compatible with diverse operational environments.

    • Jan Schaumann ☛ Bootstrapping HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3

      The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has come a long way from its humble beginnings on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT cube at CERN. It went through a number of iterations, has been abused in just about any conceivable way, chained with proxies, tunnels and caches, intercepted by middleboxes, and is for all intents and purposes the universal internet pipe and primary content delivery mechanism.

      RFC1945 describing HTTP/1.0 was fairly easy to read, but since then, things have gotten pretty complex: as of May 2025, the number of HTTP-related RFCs ranges from about a conservatively estimated dozen (focused on core protocol definitions and HTTP semantics) to a few hundred (based on title searches across the RFC index).

      HTTP/1.1 (RFC2616 and onwards) remains the lowest common denominator that clients and servers need to support, and of course modern stacks will want to use HTTP/2 (RFC9113) and HTTP/3 (RFC9114), but just how do they determine each others' capabilities and bootstrap their connection?

      Let's take a look...

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Something terrible happened with CSS

      My philosophy when it comes to CSS is that the less of it, the better. For years, this website has been as minimal as possible, as long as it didn’t hurt readability and, dare I say, style. Now one of the foundations of my design is in shambles. Should I take a day off to fix this? Should I completely rethink the 342 bytes of CSS living in the <head> section? Should I find a new style for the Jolly Teapot? Should I change my whole personality?