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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It’s a proprietary config file. I think it’s a list of rules to forbid certain behaviours on the system. Presumably it’s downloaded by some userland service, but it has to be parsed by the kernel driver. I think the files get loaded ok but the driver crashes when iterating over an array of pointers. Possibly these are the rules and some have uninitialised pointers but this is speculation based on some kernel dumps on twitter. So the bug probably existed in the kernel driver for quite a while, but they pushed a (somehow) malformed config file that triggered the crash.


  • For this Channel File, yes. I don’t know what the failure rate is - this article mentions 40-70%, but there could well be a lot of variance between different companies’ machines.

    The driver has presumably had this bug for some time, but they’ve never had a channel file trigger it before. I can’t find any good information on how they deploy these channel files other than that they push several changes per day. One would hope these are always run by a diverse set of test machines to validate there’s no impact to functionality but only they know the procedure there. It might vary based on how urgent a mitigation is or how invasive it’ll be - though they could just be winging it. It’d be interesting to find out exactly how this all went down.




  • wouldn’t changing it just end up performative

    Exactly. Sidereal time does get rid of time zones and leap years, but it’s still referenced to a single physical object and relies on a arbitrary choice of start point. So it doesn’t create some perfect cosmic time standard.

    The international date line doesn’t help since that’s just 180° offset from Greenwich itself.

    The point of standards is that they can be followed by everyone. The AD/BC epoch is fine. The Greenwich meridian is fine. UTC is fine. Changing them would cause so much disruption that it cannot be worth it.

    Daylight savings can go die in a ditch though.


  • doesn’t change

    Citation needed.

    Do you use leap seconds to stay in sync with earth’s rotation? When would they be applied? How would spacefarers be notified of these updates?

    Also, what meridian do you choose for this ‘universal’ time? Is it still Greenwich? Because that’s peak colonial baggage.



  • I would encourage you not to split things up too finely. A single repo for your environment would allow you to see all related changes with git. E.g. if you set up a new VM it might need a playbook to set something up, a script to automate a task, and a DNS entry. With a well put together commit message explaining why you’re making those changes there’s not much need for external documentation.

    Maybe if you want some more info organised in a wiki, point to the initial commit where you introduced some set up. That way you can see how something was structured. Or if you have a issue tracker you can comment with research on something and then close the issue when you commit a resolution.

    Try not to have info spread out too much or maintaining all the pieces will become a chore. Make it simple and easy to keep up.