Richard WM Jones

I was interviewed on Veritasium about the rise of Linux and the XZ hack.

Some colleagues of mine have been working hard on this for a really long time: Red Hat partners with SiFive for a RISC-V developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

I was investigating possible disk corruption when copying a disk image between servers, but needed a way to visualise what might be happening.

The RISC-V open instruction set architecture is becoming popular, but getting development boards into programmers’ hands so people can use it has been difficult and expensive so far, and the ones available have been slow.

Red Hat is hiring two software engineering positions, to work on virt-v2v and the wider MTV project.

I discovered this exploit in qemu’s network block driver: To reproduce it you’ll need nbdkit >= 1.40.1: $ wget http://oirase.annexia.org/nyan.c $ nbdkit --log=null cc nyan.c $ qemu-img info nbd://localhost What’s happening here (discussion upstream) is ju…

I did a talk about the Broadcom acquisition of VMware and using virt-v2v to liberate your VMs.

David Abdurachmanov and myself did a talk about Fedora on RISC-V.

I was interviewed on NPR Planet Money about my small role in the Jia Tan / xz / ssh backdoor.

Finally been published … https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/

Much requested, I’m now building nbdkit binaries for Windows.

I have a lot of RISC-V and Arm hardware.

# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 hart : 0 isa : rv64imafdcvsu mmu : sv39 cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz cpu-icache : 64KB cpu-dcache : 64KB cpu-l2cache : 1MB cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes cpu-vector : 0.7.1 processor : 1 hart : 1 isa : rv64im…

At some point I will do a head to head comparison of HiFive Unmatched, Vision Five 2, Lichee Pi 4A, and Raspberry Pi 4B.

Well that blew up.

And it only took 21 hours.

This seems too crazy to work, but it does: $ nbdkit memory 1G $ nbdfuse mem nbd://localhost & [1] 1053075 $ ll mem -rw-rw-rw-. 1 rjones rjones 1073741824 May 17 18:31 mem Now boot qemu with that memory as the backing RAM: $ qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 \ -o…

If you want to simulate how your filesystem behaves with a bad drive underneath you have a few options like the kernel dm-flakey device, writing a bash nbdkit plugin, kernel fault injection or a few others.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog posting here about Fedora having frame pointers (LWN backgrounder, HN thread).

I’m just going to leave a link to it … Also watch David Smith’s youtube vid: More Jonesforth links …