Veritasium
I was interviewed on Veritasium about the rise of Linux and the XZ hack.
Richard WM Jones
Virtualization, tools and tips
Latest posts
Red Hat / SiFive RHEL 10 on RISC-V developer release
Some colleagues of mine have been working hard on this for a really long time: Red Hat partners with SiFive for a RISC-V developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
Graphical differences between two disk images
I was investigating possible disk corruption when copying a disk image between servers, but needed a way to visualise what might be happening. The disk image is tens of gigabytes, so looking at it in hexdump wasn’t a lot of … Continue reading →
Benchmarking RISC-V SpaceMIT X60 and others
The RISC-V open instruction set architecture is becoming popular, but getting development boards into programmers’ hands so people can use it has been difficult and expensive so far, and the ones available have been slow. Things are changing, slowly, but … Continue reading →
Virt-v2v take-out hiring
Red Hat is hiring two software engineering positions, to work on virt-v2v and the wider MTV project. Virt-v2v is the software we use for “VMware take-out”, ie. converting existing virtual machines from VMware to run on KVM (Openshift, Openstack, or … Continue reading →
Exploit qemu to display nyancat
I discovered this exploit in qemu’s network block driver: To reproduce it you’ll need nbdkit >= 1.40.1: What’s happening here (discussion upstream) is just that qemu prints the error message from the server without sanitisation, so we can send terminal … Continue reading →
Virt-v2v | Devconf.cz lightning talk
I did a talk about the Broadcom acquisition of VMware and using virt-v2v to liberate your VMs. Check it out below. It’s only 5 minutes long! (Note this is a link to the livestream, it should start at 7h 4m … Continue reading →
Fedora on RISC-V | Devconf.cz talk
David Abdurachmanov and myself did a talk about Fedora on RISC-V. Check it out below. (Note this is a link to the live stream, and it should start playing at 4h 45m 14s)
I was interviewed on NPR Planet Money
I was interviewed on NPR Planet Money about my small role in the Jia Tan / xz / ssh backdoor. NPR journalist Jeff Guo interviewed me for a whole 2 hours, and I was on the program (very edited) for … Continue reading →
Red Hat Research article on RISC-V extensions
Finally been published … https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
nbdkit binaries for Windows
Much requested, I’m now building nbdkit binaries for Windows. You can get them from the Fedora Koji build system by following this link. Choose the latest build by me (not one of the automatic builds), then under the noarch heading look for … Continue reading →
Heads up! Lichee Pi 4A vs VisionFive 2 vs HiFive Unmatched vs Raspberry Pi 4B
I have a lot of RISC-V and Arm hardware. How do my latest 3 RISC-V purchases stand up against each other and the stalwart Raspberry Pi 4B? Let’s find out! The similarities between these boards are striking. All have 4 … Continue reading →
LicheePi 4A cpuinfo etc
# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 hart : 0 isa : rv64imafdcvsu mmu : sv39 cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz cpu-icache : 64KB cpu-dcache : 64KB cpu-l2cache : 1MB cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes cpu-vector : 0.7.1 processor : 1 … Continue reading →
Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A
At some point I will do a head to head comparison of HiFive Unmatched, Vision Five 2, Lichee Pi 4A, and Raspberry Pi 4B. I believe this little Lichee board below might win!
Follow up to “I booted Linux 292,612 times”
Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect. To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened. As they say, don’t believe everything … Continue reading →
I booted Linux 292,612 times
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one has … Continue reading →
NBD-backed qemu guest RAM
This seems too crazy to work, but it does: $ nbdkit memory 1G$ nbdfuse mem nbd://localhost &[1] 1053075$ ll mem-rw-rw-rw-. 1 rjones rjones 1073741824 May 17 18:31 mem Now boot qemu with that memory as the backing RAM: $ qemu-system-x86_64 … Continue reading →
nbdkit’s evil filter
If you want to simulate how your filesystem behaves with a bad drive underneath you have a few options like the kernel dm-flakey device, writing a bash nbdkit plugin, kernel fault injection or a few others. We didn’t have that … Continue reading →
Frame pointers vs DWARF – my verdict
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog posting here about Fedora having frame pointers (LWN backgrounder, HN thread). I made some mistakes in that blog posting and retracted it, but I wasn’t wrong about the conclusions, just wrong … Continue reading →
SmithForth
I’m just going to leave a link to it … Also watch David Smith’s youtube vid: More Jonesforth links …