reflexive.space

An article about experimenting with the RAMINDEX feature on Arm Cortex-A76 cores.

A note about speculative oracles and the Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE).

A story about hacking on UEFI firmware for Intel platforms.

Some notes and impressions about the properties of return instructions.

This article explores the conditions for triggering "Zenbleed" (CVE-2023-20593).

This article explores the local branch prediction on Apple's "Avalanche" microarchitecture.

This is short review about creating a bare-metal microbenchmarking environment for the Apple M2 (specifically, for my new 13" MacBook Pro with the T8112).

This is the second part of my exploration into branch prediction and speculation in the Zen 2 microarchitecture, where we look at the behavior of unconditional direct branches and continue digging into details about the branch predictor.

This is the first part of my exploration into branch prediction and speculation in the Zen 2 microarchitecture, where I introduce a lot of context and present some tests with conditional branches.

Anecdote about having fun with x86 performance-monitoring counters.

Anecdote about having fun with AMD's "instruction-based sampling" features.

A veiled complaint about Elon Musk tweeting on how Neuralink creates the possibility of "conceptual telepathy."

tl;dr I wrote a somewhat-simple crate for decoding 32-bit ARMv5 and Thumb instructions called armbf.

A story about being afraid to write poetry.

A friend of mine brought up a great question some months ago: "Why does GCC spit out a huuuge ELF when I compile the simplest possible 'hello, world' program?

This is an example of a classic stack-smashing attack, and some discussion about associated mitigations in Linux.

Some thoughts after watching Brendan Gregg's LCA2017 talk about developments in eBPF tracing.

Social systems are complicated, and people are not machines.