Ubuntu Slaughters Kittens | BSD Now 103
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it for Cantrill's entertaining epoll versus kqueue rant and his stories, such as bricking a machine with rm -rf.
What it is
A BSD Now episode featuring a long interview with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill on dtrace, ZFS, pkgsrc, containers and more. It includes his rant on why Linux epoll is flawed and stories from Sun.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2015 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends protomyth · 2015-10 · on “Things you can do with ZFS [video]”
Probably not, since that would have allowed someone to add GPL-only code to it which couldn't be distributed with the whole. The video is very good and you can follow-up with [this video]
Recommends myztic · 2015-11 · on “Run containers on bare metal already [video]”
Amusing Interview with Bryan Cantrill (regarding his background and he also shares some stories) [this video] Also very informative (about what happened at Sun in the 90s, dtrace, ...) Quite a funny and smart guy ;)
Recommends Gracana · 2016-08 · on ““Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)”
This sounds like something straight out of the Unix Hater's Handbook. :) But epoll is not the fault of Unix. Linux gets it wrong, but others do not. There's a good (and wildly entertaining) discussion/rant about it in this BSD Now episode: [this video]
Recommends beefhash · 2018-02 · on “Talks I have given”
I also found the somewhat more casual BSDnow podcasts that featured Mr. Cantrill quite insightful[1,2,3]. He shows up around 15 or 30 minutes in. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Cites myztic · 2016-02 · on “No POST after rm -rf /”
Reminds me of Cantrill, more so his story when they completely bricked a machine of a fellow worker once and then took a close look at the standard[1]. # rm -rf / Among other things, it will delete the current directory. In the standard it does not say what to delete first, In their implementation it will try to remove the current directory first -> undefined behaviour -> it fails. The logic behind it: When is it really your goal to delete your entire machine, mostly never, you don't type it out by accident, but shell scripts with unset variables might do it. And regarding Poettering's response[2] (not trying to start a fight): It's Poettering, what do you expect? You can hate or love system
Cites protomyth · 2016-02 · on “Linux 4.5-rc5: efivarfs fixed to avoid “rm -rf /” bricking UEFI”
For the few use cases where a system admin wants to "rm -rf /", there are hundreds of bad scripts that can screw up a system. I believe Solaris did the right thing and made it not work. [this video]
Cites bcantrill · 2016-03 · on “Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10”
Exciting stuff! This is (very?) similar what with LX branded zones in SmartOS[1][2] -- and, as I've said before[3] -- we want as many other systems as possible take this approach. That said, we also know how long a haul this is, and how detail-intensive it is. So I've got a bunch of questions. ;) First, is the source available? Second, how much of the One Hundred Language Quine Relay[4] runs successfully? (For us, running that sucker to completion was an important early milestone.) Assuming that runs, my next questions are all common apps/programs that we knew to be especially thorny for one reason or another: Go, strace, tcpdump, systemd, etc. Anyway, it's great to see the SmartOS approach
Cites gizmo · 2017-02 · on “Epoll is fundamentally broken”
The linked interview with Bryan Cantrill gives a good explanation of why it's broken: a straightforward implementation behaves in a way you never want, with bizarre behavior where the kernel can wake up a thread with an accept() on a fd that has already been closed. linux should just have adopted kqueue or an IOCP model instead. [this video]