Life, Code and everything in between


 I’ve been around in the Free and Open Source world for over 20 years now,
initially as a user but largely as a hacker. Since I started making money
using (and growing) my technical skills, it never once occurred to me that I’d
be doing anything other than writing FOS software. Which is why over the years
as I grew up the Engineer Value Stack* in my career, I…


 So early last year I finished implemented everything needed for a fully working _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 so that disrtributions can use it out of the box. OpenSUSE adopted it almost immediately and Gentoo started the work of adding it to their hardened profile. I proposed to make it the default for Fedora 38 after some tests but people quoted to me this blog post that some guy wrote , telling…


 I have been stereotyped by many I know (and understandably so) as a quintessential computer geek, probably someone who dabbled in computers since his childhood and is his first love. That is however far from the truth because I first programmed a computer at the age of 20 and started my career soon after as a lowly back office outsourced engineer that a lot of the geek community looks…


 How many of you have written this kind of code in the past: 

 o = xmalloc (old_size);
...
n = xrealloc (o, new_size);

if (n != o)
 {
 o = n;
 /* Update other pointers that referred to o or offsets from it. */
 }
 

 Not uncommon right? We’re not dereferencing the freed o and the pointer is after all, a number and hence should…


 Update: There’s a Links section at the end that should give you a list of all the reference you’ll ever need to undrstand Linkers and Relocations! 

 When I started out in compilers years ago, I found relocations especially hard to wrap my head around. They’re just simple math in the end but they combine elements from different places that make it complicated…


 My background in computers is a bit hacky for a compiler engineer. I never had the theoretical computer science base that the average compiler geek does (yes I have a Masters in Computer Applications, but it’s from India and yes I’m going to leave that hanging without explanation) and I have pretty much winged it all these years. What follows is a bunch of thoughts (high…


 For some time now, I kept running into one specific piece of code in luajit repeatedly for various reasons and last month I came across a fascinating bug in the register allocator pitfall that I had never encountered before. But then as is the norm after fixing such bugs, I concluded that it’s too trivial to write about and I was just stupid to not have found it sooner; all bugs…


 It’s been a different 3 months. For over 6 years I had been working almost exclusively on the GNU toolchain with a focus on glibc and I now had the chance of working on a completely different set of projects, something I had done a lot of during my Red Hat technical support days but not since. I was to look into Pypy, OpenJDK and LuaJIT, three very different projects with very…


 About 2.5 years ago I left Red Hat to join Linaro in a move that surprised even me for the first few months. I still work on the GNU toolchain with a glibc focus, but my focus changed considerably. I am no longer looking at the toolchain in its entirety (although I do that on my own time whenever I can, either as glibc release manager or reviewer); my focus is making glibc routines…


 Since I joined Linaro back in 2015 around this time, my travel has gone up 3x with 2 Linaro Connects a year added to the one GNU Tools Cauldron. This year I went to FOSSAsia too, so it’s been a busy traveling year. The special thing about Cauldron though is that it is one of those conferences where I ‘work’ as well as have a lot of fun. The fun bit is because I get to…