In our last post, we had some fun dunking on my poor, hapless TA. We asked and answered the question, “what is null”, and in answering that question, learned some important lessons about computer systems: Everything is just data and context. When hardware and software components are interacting with each…

I remember when I was an undergraduate taking my first computer science course. We were learning about the null type in Java, and someone asked the (rather clumsy) TA, “I understand that you can compare an object to null to see if it was allocated, but what actually is null?”…

I solved a pretty interesting bug in the Linux kernel livepatch subsystem earlier this year. The issue was this: when rolling out a livepatch to the fleet, we would detect a spike in TCP retransmit events while the livepatch was being applied. Let’s start by discussing the basics of livepatching…

In the previous blog post, we learned how to set up a dev environment to use mutt to subscribe to Linux kernel mailing lists on vger. We are now receiving patches for any of the lists we subscribed to, and can view them, download and experiment with them, and perform…

As I mentioned in my first blog post, most of my career has been spent in kernel space. I’ve of course done a ton of development work on Linux as a platform, but I started on the Linux kernel team with essentially zero knowledge of how the Linux kernel itself…

Welcome, everyone, to my blog, which I have named Byte Lab. As you may have seen on the About page, this blog is going to be systems engineering-themed. What this roughly means is that I’ll be talking about anything I find interesting, as it pertains to what engineers in my…