Status update, September 2022

I have COVID-19 and I am halfway through my stockpile of tissues, so I’m gonna keep this status update brief.

In Hare news, I finally put the last pieces into place to make cross compiling as easy as possible. Nothing else particularly world-shattering going on here. I have a bunch of new stuff in my patch queue to review once I’m feeling better, however, including bigint stuff — a big step towards TLS support. Unrelatedly, TLS support seems to be progressing upstream in qbe. (See what I did there?)

powerctl is a small new project I wrote to configure power management states on Linux. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned...

Notes from kernel hacking in Hare, part 1

One of the goals for the Hare programming language is to be able to write kernels, such as my Helios project. Kernels are complex beasts which exist in a somewhat unique problem space and have constraints that many userspace programs are not accustomed to. To illustrate this, I’m going to highlight a scenario where Hare’s low-level types and manual memory management approach shines to enable a difficult use-case.

Helios is a micro-kernel. During system initialization, its job is to load the initial task into memory, prepare the initial set of kernel objects for its use, provide it with information about the system, then jump to userspace and fuck off...

In praise of qemu

qemu is another in a long line of great software started by Fabrice Bellard. It provides virtual machines for a wide variety of software architectures. Combined with KVM, it forms the foundation of nearly all cloud services, and it runs SourceHut in our self-hosted datacenters. Much like Bellard’s ffmpeg revolutionized the multimedia software industry, qemu revolutionized virtualisation.

qemu comes with a large variety of studiously implemented virtual devices, from standard real-world hardware like e1000 network interfaces to accelerated virtual hardware like virtio drives. One can, with the right combination of command line arguments, produce a virtual machine of essentially any configuration, either for testing novel configurations or for running production-ready virtual...

Summary of C/C++ integer rules

powerctl: A small case study in Hare for systems programming

powerctl is a little weekend project I put together to provide a simple tool for managing power states on Linux. I had previously put my laptop into suspend with a basic “echo mem | doas tee /sys/power/state”, but this leaves a lot to be desired. I have to use doas to become root, and it’s annoying to enter my password — not to mention difficult to use in a script or to attach to a key binding. powerctl is the solution: a small 500-line Hare program which provides comprehensive support for managing power states on Linux for non-privileged users.

This little project ended up being a useful case-study...

A review of postmarketOS on the Xiaomi Poco F1

I have recently had cause to start looking into mainline Linux phones which fall outside of the common range of grassroots phones like the PinePhone (which was my daily driver for the past year). The postmarketOS wiki is a great place to research candidate phones for this purpose, and the phone I landed on is the Xiaomi Poco F1, which I picked up on Amazon.nl (for ease of return in case it didn’t work out) for 270 Euro. Phones of this nature have a wide range of support from Linux distros like postmarketOS, from “not working at all” to “mostly working”. The essential features I require in...

PINE64 has let its community down

Context for this post:

I know that apologising and taking responsibility for your mistakes is difficult. It seems especially difficult for commercial endeavours, which have fostered a culture of cold disassociation from responsibility for their actions, where admitting to wrongdoing is absolutely off the table. I disagree with this culture, but I understand where it comes from, and I can empathise with those who find themselves in the position of having to reconsider their actions in the light of the harm they have done. It’s not easy.

But, the reckoning must come. I have...

Status update, August 2022

It is a blessedly cool morning here in Amsterdam. I was busy moving house earlier this month, so this update is a bit quieter than most.

For a fun off-beat project this month, I started working on a GameBoy emulator written in Hare. No promises on when it will be functional or how much I plan on working on it – just doing it for fun. In more serious Hare news, I have implemented Thread-Local Storage (TLS) for qbe, our compiler backend. Hare’s standard library does not support multi-threading, but I needed this for Helios, whose driver library does support threads. It will also presumably be of use...

How I wish I could organize my thoughts

I keep a pen & notebook on my desk, which I make liberal use of to jot down my thoughts. It works pretty well: ad-hoc todo lists, notes on problems I’m working on, tables, flowcharts, etc. It has some limitations, though. Sharing anything out of my notebook online is an awful pain in the ass. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, so tables and flowcharts are a challenge. No edits, either, so lots of crossed-out words and redrawn or rewritten pages. And of course, my handwriting sucks and I can type much more efficiently than I can write. I wish this was a...

Analog vs. digital games