Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling

I’m often asked why the Rust test runner I maintain, cargo-nextest, runs every test in a separate process. Here’s my best attempt at explaining the rationale behind it. This document is cross-posted from the canonical copy at the nextest site. Benchmarks are available there as well, though a large part of this document talks about...

At Oxide, we use Helios as the base OS for the cloud computers we sell. Helios is a distribution of illumos, a Unix-based operating system descended from Solaris. As someone who learned illumos on the job, I’ve been really impressed by the powerful debugging tools it provides. I had a chance to use some of them recently to track down a...

As of this writing, it appears that another open-source project lead has rejected a proposal to replace gendered he language with they, citing vague concerns about “politics.” (Please refrain from contacting the project about this; it’s counterproductive.) At Oxide, one of our core values is empathy: the ability to understand others’...

Introduction One of the coolest features of AMD’s Ryzen desktop CPUs, and historically a great reason to get them over the competition, was the official support for error-corrected memory (ECC RAM)1. With most Ryzen 1000 through 5000 series CPUs and the right motherboards, ordinary users could get ECC RAM going without having to spring for more...

I used to use this as a place to write long-form thoughts, but with the demise of Twitter I want to also write short-form posts here under the #shorts tag. I also post on Mastodon but that’s a little more ephemeral and less searchable than this blog. Let’s say you’re creating a temporary directory with some cached artifacts to share across...