Plurrrr

It’s that time again: there’s a new major version of Emacs and, with it, a treasure trove of new features and changes.

Notable features include the formal inclusion of native compilation, a technique that will greatly speed up your Emacs experience.

A critical issue surrounding the use of ligatures also fixed; without it, you couldn’t use ligatures in Emacs 27 without crashes. So that’s good news indeed also.

Kernel modules are object files used to extend an operating system’s kernel functionality at run time.

In this post, we’ll look at implementing a simple character device driver as a kernel module in NetBSD. Once it is loaded, userspace processes will be able to write an arbitrary byte string to the device, and on every successive read expect a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom permutation of the original byte string.

At Cloudflare, we’re used to being the fastest in the world. However, for approximately 30 minutes last December, Cloudflare was slow. Between 20:10 and 20:40 UTC on December 16, 2021, web requests served by Cloudflare were artificially delayed by up to five seconds before being processed. This post tells the story of how a missing shell option called “pipefail” slowed Cloudflare down.