Recent content on Eliyahu's Ramblings
Disclaimer: The following post has been written vaguely in the midst of a spiral. I needed a way to get my emotions out somehow because other ways are failing. I have not proofread or properly thought about this while writing whatsoever. Proceed with caution? This is I think the first time I’ve written about mental health on this blog. It’s been a big part of my life for many years,…
I was in the middle of writing yet another job application (#internship-grind) when one of friends messaged me telling I should just use an LLM to write it for me. My immediate response, as it is to most LLM related things, was “AAAAAAAA ughhhhhh I have feelings™️” 1 , prompting the reply “That’s not very 10x mindset of you” along with a link to an article from where…
With exams looming in a couple months and precisely zero revision done, now is clearly the perfect time to go down the rabbithole of clearing up the mess that is my current homelab configuration. As with all good rabbitholes, it started with the simple mistake of having a Thought™ - “how can I centralise authentication instead of having a mess in my password manager?”. And so into the…
Source code (and maybe prebuilt ISOs?) is all available on GitHub . It’s been a very long time since I posted anything here, mainly cause I just haven’t had the motivation to write anything interesting. Many eons I started (and as is the way, never finished) a series of posts about writing a UEFI bootloader in Rust. That was all part of my long-running side project - Popcorn2 (the 2…
For anyone who just wants the solution without the story, skip to [here](#What if the firmware just had drivers?). For around three years I’ve been running a Proxmox server on an R720, for random projects like hosting this exact site. (Also it’s just fun to gauge people’s reactions when you show them a photo of a big 2U server in your room.) However, for around the past two years…
For the past few years, I’ve been using Senheiser HD 202s as my headphones (I found them lying unused in a cupboard - yay free stuff). So far they’ve been pretty good in my opinion, having never devled into the rabbithole that is audio at any point. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago, one of the conductors in their cable seems to have come loose, and now the headphones only work when…
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post in this series, but not to worry, because stuff has been happening. The bootloader has significantly progressed since the last post, I just haven’t had the want or time to write another blog post until now. So the big change for this post is that the UI is now actually somewhat usable. I tried for a bit of time to write a UI library…
In the last post I managed to get unwinding working within the kernel, but there was the small issue that it would only print out addresses, and each one would need to be converted with a tool like addr2line to get any useful debugging information out. The best solution would probably be to get the bootloader to load in debuginfo and parse that in the same way addr2line does. However, this has a…
Apparently it’s been nearly two months since the previous post. Not to worry though, because (after A levels finished) I’ve been busy with more Popcorn, and made significant progress in both the design and implentation. There’s a couple of UEFI posts still to come (one currently in the pipeline) but I thought it might be worth posting soemthing in the meantime to give the…
At the end of the last post, I said that I’d probably start working on filesystems and image rendering. And I’m pleased to say that both of those have been a success. I started writing this as a single post, but when trying to arrange it into something actually readable, realised it made more sense to split into two. This will likely end up being fairly short, with a much longer post…
With filesystem access in place, we can start working on loading images from the disk, and putting together a basic UI. Once that’s in place, we should be able to load a kernel image from disk, and boot into it. The Targa image format Having messed around with BMP images a few times before (including a very strange competition of trying to write a block colour image to disk as fast as…
For some reason, I decided that for this attempt, it would be fun trying to write a bootloader myself rather then relying on GRUB. I could make up probably-untrue excuse about easier access to hardware control, like the GOP , but the real reason is likely closer to “why not?”. I discovered that there’s a uefi-rs crate already available, so started by reorganising the Popcorn2…
Having been demotivated from continuing with Popcorn attempt 1 with all the strange, hard to track down memory bugs, I decided to start again (and write this series of blog posts alongside) but in Rust. I technically have already done some OS development in Rust, in the experimental pre-Popcorn times, but at that point had never used it before, and didn’t properly understand how to write…
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