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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • It’s hard to overcome the Hurd problem though. Although it would be fascinating to see how it would diverge on the design of the Linux kernel. How much can you still act like Linux while not being Linux? Or would it just be a direct algorithmic translation, basically doing the same processes under the hood with the same architecture? I’m sure there’s more than a few things Linux is doing in C that the Rust compiler would frown upon.






  • And when it’s really unusable as a desktop anymore, it can become a headless PiHole server. There’s always a use. Back in 2005 I was using an old Pentium MMX laptop with a broken screen as a Wifi access point/router. I even bought a two-way 2.4Ghz amplifier to hang off the laptop’s PCMCIA wifi card to boost it throughout the apartment.




  • I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I’m trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I’ve been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.

    It’s one of those “aha!” moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.