x86 Kernel Development & Relocatable Binaries – What I learned about Toolchains and Relocatable Code

This post is roughly a summary of the obscure knowledge I learned about toolchains and relocatable code in the last couple of years by studying the code of the microkernels NOVA and Hedron, my professional hands-on experience with kernel development, and several learning projects. I present some of the “hard and not obvious” properties of producing kernel binaries, information that only stands “between the lines” in existing projects, and topics I didn’t find Read more…

Working on Mini Operating Systems for Testing of Virtualization Stacks at Cyberus

Usually, I do not just forward people to other blogs. But the other day, I published an interesting article on my company’s* tech blog about testing virtualization stacks using mini operating systems. Here’s the excerpt: Testing and debugging erroneous behavior by a guest under a virtualization stack is hard and difficult. By leveraging multiple mini operating system kernels, we can investigate issues related to complicated topics, such as never delivered interrupts, with a Read more…

Output of "--help" of my "ftp-backup" shell wrapper for "lftp" (screenshot).

Modern Command Line Tool for FTP Backups

TL;DR: The convenient CLI-based FTP mirroring tool you wished for (hopefully, lol). In my previous blog post, I presented lftp as my CLI tool of choice in 2024 to connect to FTP servers to perform a parallel recursive download with FTPS (FTP over TLS). However, lftp is a powerful low-level building block, and you need to know how to use it to mirror a directory via FTP. I created a small convenient bash Read more…

Parallel Recursive FTPS Mirroring (Directory Download) from Command Line

TL;DR In this blog post, I show you the best option I found that you can use in 2024 to perform a parallel recursive download (backup) of an FTP directory via FTPS (explicit FTP via TLS) from the command line. lftp is the best command line tool (for Linux, macOS and other UNIX-like systems), but needs to be properly configured. For GUI-focused users, I recommend FileZilla. Introduction FTP is a quite outdated protocol Read more…

Code snippet: Command line tool lftp for a parallel recursive secure FTP download of a remote directory.