No More Blue Fridays (via) Brendan Gregg: "In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF code."
New-to-me things I picked up from this:
- eBPF - a technology I had thought was unique to the a Linux kernel - is coming Windows!
- A useful mental model to have for eBPF is that it provides a WebAssembly-style sandbox for kernel code.
- eBPF doesn't stand for "extended Berkeley Packet Filter" any more - that name greatly understates its capabilities and has been retired. More on that in the eBPF FAQ.
- From this Hacker News thread eBPF programs can be analyzed before running despite the halting problem because eBPF only allows verifiably-halting programs to run.
Recent articles
- Using pip to install a Large Language Model that's under 100MB - 7th February 2025
- OpenAI o3-mini, now available in LLM - 31st January 2025
- A selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source - 24th January 2025