Posts about programming, DevOps, Linux server management, and more.
The other day, I was working on some udev rules to invoke a script when a USB device is added or removed from my machine. I needed the USB bus and USB port number to further process that event. I decided to use udev for that. However, getting the relevant Read more…
The other day I was working with fixed-output derivations. After copying several files to $out, I was facing a “Illegal path references in fixed-output derivation error”. The only helpful reference on the internet I could find was the Nix source code on GitHub. It took me a while to figure Read more…
Usually, Nix derivations are build in a sandbox that prevent any program from accessing the network. This has a good reason: We want reproducibility in Nix, and using the network is not reproducible for many reasons! But there must be a way of accessing the network from a derivation, right? Read more…
I recently came across the problem that pkgs.gcc_multi comes with gcc in version 12 but I needed version 11. While nixpkgs exports gcc in multiple versions (pkgs.gcc, pkgs.gcc11, pkgs.gcc12, pkgs.gcc13), pkgs.gcc_multi is only exported once, backed with the version coming from pkgs.gcc. However, using another, specific gcc version is fairly Read more…
Today, I’d like to introduce you to PhipsBoot. 🎉 I started working on it in September 2023 or so, but polished it just recently. A lot of knowledge from my previous blog post about x86 Kernel Development & Relocatable Binaries went into this project. PhipsBoot is a relocatable x86_64 bootloader Read more…
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 Read more…