x86.lol

Polyglot NixOS: The Same Disk Image for All Architectures

19 Dec 2025

Polyglot NixOS: The Same Disk Image for All Architectures

19 Dec 2025

Recently a colleague (https://github.com/samueldr) mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart

Quick and Dirty Website Change Monitoring

10 Aug 2025

Let’s say, you need to monitor a website for changes and you really don’t have a lot of time to set things up. Also solving the problem with money using services, such as changedetection.io

Quick and Dirty Website Change Monitoring

10 Aug 2025

FOSDEM Edition: Thoughts on the Microkernels

30 Jan 2025

FOSDEM Edition: Thoughts on the Microkernels

30 Jan 2025

It’s FOSDEM (https://fosdem.org/2025/) time! I have fond memories of the Microkernel and Component-based OS devroom (https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/microkernel/) in particular. It’s a

Hardening C Against ROP: Getting CET Shadow Stacks Working

23 Sep 2024

Hardening C Against ROP: Getting CET Shadow Stacks Working

23 Sep 2024

This post shows you how to use CET (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/technical-look-control-flow-enforcement-technology.html) user shadow stacks

Immutable Systems: Cross-Compiling for RISC-V using Nix Flakes

21 Sep 2024

In my last post (/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.html), we built whole disk images for embedded systems using Nix (https://nixos.org). This approach is well suited for RISC-V or ARM systems,

Immutable Systems: Cross-Compiling for RISC-V using Nix Flakes

21 Sep 2024

Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate

28 Aug 2024

When you build software for embedded devices (your Wi-Fi router or home automation setup on your Raspberry Pi), there is always the question how to build these images and how to update them. What I

Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate

28 Aug 2024

Confidential Computing: Complexity vs Security

7 Jul 2024

This blog post is a continuation of my previous (/generic/2023/02/07/intel-tdx.html) posts (/generic/2023/06/28/intel-tdx-2.html) about Confidential Computing

Confidential Computing: Complexity vs Security

7 Jul 2024

RISC-V: The (Almost) Unused Bit in JALR

20 Dec 2023

In the RISC-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V) architecture, you have excellent support for embedding information into code by choosing compressed or uncompressed instructions. While being a

RISC-V: The (Almost) Unused Bit in JALR

20 Dec 2023

Split Lock Detection VM Hangs

7 Nov 2023

Recently, I’ve noticed strange hangs of KVM VMs on a custom VMM. As it fits the topic of this blog, I thought I make the issue more googleable. Until we dive into the issue, we have to set the

Split Lock Detection VM Hangs

7 Nov 2023

Intel TDX Doesn't Protect You from the Cloud

28 Jun 2023

This post is a continuation of my previous post about Intel TDX (/generic/2023/02/07/intel-tdx.html). It’s worth a read before reading this post. As before, I’m not going to introduce TDX itself.

Intel TDX Doesn't Protect You from the Cloud

28 Jun 2023