I put my pants on just like the rest of you -- one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make Free Software.
Suddenly I have been hearing the term Landlock more in (agent) security circles. To me this is a bit weird because while Landlock is absolutely a useful Linux security tool, it’s been a bit obscure and that’s for good reason. It feels to me a lot like the how weird prevalence of the word delve became a clear tipoff that LLMs were the ones writing, not a human. Here’s my opinion: Agentic LLM AI…
It’s clear LLMs are one of the biggest changes in technology ever. The rate of progress is astounding: recently due to a configuration mistake I accidentally used Claude Sonnet 3.5 (released ~2 years ago) instead of Opus 4.6 for a task and looked at the output and thought “what is this garbage”? But daily now: Opus 4.6 is able to generate reasonable PoC level Rust code for complex tasks for me.…
Sandboxed, reviewed parallel agents make sense For coding and software engineering, I’ve used and experimented with various frontends (FOSS and proprietary) to multiple foundation models (mostly proprietary) trying to keep up with the state of the art. I’ve come to strongly believe in a few things: Agentic AI for coding needs strongly sandboxed, reproducible environments It makes sense to run…
The systemd docs talk about UsrMerge , and while bootc works nicely with this, it does not require it and never will. In this blog we’ll touch on the rationale for that a bit. The first stumbling block is pretty simple: For many people shipping “/usr merge” systems, a a lot of backwards compatibility symlinks are required, like /bin → /usr/bin etc. Those symbolic links are pretty load bearing, and…
I recently made a new project in Rust that is generating multiple bootable operating system disk image types from a "pristine" image with the goal of deduplicating storage. At one point I decided to speed it up using rayon . Each thread here is basically taking a pristine base (read-only), doing some nontrivial computation and writing a new version derived from it. The code is using…
Every weekday for many years now I ve woken up, dropped my kids off at school, then grabbed a coffee and sat down at my computer to work on OpenShift and Fedora+RHEL. Doing this for so long, over time I ve thought about and refined the why I do this, and I want to write it down so that I can refer to this in various places. Some of this is a more condensed/rephrased variant of this blog post . I…
Over 4 years ago now, I wrote about moving ostree to Github , and I wanted to add an update here. I still think it was the right move. Free Software is important to me but I think Github overall provides a lot more benefit to FOSS than harm from its mostly proprietary nature. Providing a zero-cost mostly reliable featureful platform (also with various zero-cost CI available) is a huge accelerant…
Quite a while ago I came across the SQLite testing page and was impressed (and since then it s gotten even better). They ve clearly invested a lot in it, and I think SQLite s ubiquity is well deserved. When I started the ostree project I had this in mind but testing is hard. We have decent "unit test style" coverage since the start but that s not very "real world". We ve gone through a few test…
This is going to be a longer blog entry, but here s a TL;DR: I propose that instead of "immutable" or "read-only" when talking about operating systems (such as Fedora CoreOS , Google COOS , Flatcar etc.), we use these terms: "fully managed": The system does not have "unmanaged state" e.g. an admin interactively doing ssh and making changes not recorded declaratively somewhere else "image based":…
There s been a lot of discussion on this proposed Fedora change for Workstation to use BTRFS . First off, some background: I reprovision my workstation about every 2-3 months to avoid it becoming too much of a "pet". I took the opportunity for this reprovision to try out BTRFS again (it d been years). Executive summary BTRFS should be an option, even an emphasized one. It probably shouldn t be the…