Articles on Linux

Top deep-dives on Linux

My business card runs Linux, yours can too

Dmitry Grinberg describes making a business card that runs Linux.

Container networking is simple

Containers are all the craze, and have been for the past couple of years. And why not? They're isolated little environments of bespoke software stacks that are easily sharable. One of their few downsides though (for most people), is the added complexity of networking. Fortunately Ivan Velichko has written a thorough article on how networking between containers work, both on your local machine and with the external world

Essential Page Cache theory

"In essence the Page Cache is a part of Virtual File System (VFS) which main purpose, as you can guess, is improving IO latency of read and write operations". In this second article of a nine part series, Viacheslav Biriukov answers questions like what is, what problem does it solve, and why is it called a "Page" cache, then goes on to outline how reads and writes are handled.

Unix command line conventions over time

Lars Wirzenius outlines the history and design choices of the Unix command line options so often used today.

A Bonding Exercise

The Linux bonding driver provides a method for aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical "bonded" interface. Patrik Lundin and his colleague were experimenting with one of these bonded interfaces when they noticed that the MAC address of the interface would change on network restart. This article details their quest for determining the cause.

Made of Bugs

Nelson Elhage describes a bug related to creating child processes in Linux that was causing unexpected crashes in a small percentage of distributed jobs.

A System-Witch's Package Manager Murder Mystery

Artemis Everfree walks us through fixing an obscure bug related to exported env vars when running a package manager on a Linux machine.

An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes

Jordan Webb explains how a misapplied patch in Ubuntu caused it to panic when Docker containers were launched.

Exploration of the Dirty Pipe Vulnerability (CVE-2022-0847)

Valentin Obst and Martin Clauß make a Linux kernel vulnerability digestible using a proof of concept program as a learning aide.

Racing against the clock -- hitting a tiny kernel race window

Jann Horn does a very deep and technical dive on exploiting a garbage collection race condition in the Linux kernel.

The quantum state of Linux kernel garbage collection CVE-2021-0920 (Part I)

Xingyu Jin does "a deep dive into an in-the-wild Android exploit" that is enabled by a race condition in the Linux kernel's garbage collector.

Bringing WireGuard to Genode

Martin Stein explores implementing a WireGuard VPN on Gentoo Linux.

POSIX hardlink heartache

Michael Orlitzky illuminates how hardlinks on UNIX systems can be exploited.