You're installing a new Linux kernel or drivers or some other package that needs to update your initramfs, and you see a message like this:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-53-generic W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8125a-3.fw for module r8169 W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168fp-3.fw for module r8169
What does this mean?
Sourcetrail is an open source visualisation tool that helps to understand complex code bases.
Long ago, I somehow convinced the director of airport security to let me take Bertie into the arrivals hall at the Delhi Airport.
An international conspiracy leads to my baking a whimsically named New England cookie for the first time.
What should you do if you
A link to my daughter's appeal to the Indian Government to repatriate Indian students stranded in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wherein I discover the decadent French “fondant au chocolat” and overcome a shortage of baking powder.
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This article is about how pipes are implemented the Unix kernel. I was a little disappointed that a recent article titled “How do Unix pipes work?” was not about the internals, and curious enough to go digging in some old sources to try to answer the question.
Pipes are “perhaps the single most striking invention in Unix” — a defining characteristic of the Unix philosophy of composing small programs together, and a familiar sight in the Unix shell:
$ echo hello | wc -c 6
We had unexpectedly heavy snowfall the other day and, as always, the mains power supply came back only after a few days of repairing broken power lines in the forest. Meanwhile, the days were so overcast that the solar inverter couldn't charge the batteries enough to keep up with our minimal domestic load.
Which meant that when the sun came out again, I was left staring at something like this for a long time:
root@soot:~# ps -eo pid,cmd|grep '[f]sck' 756 /lib/systemd/systemd-fsck /dev/mapper/sdb1_crypt 757 /sbin/fsck -a -T -l -M -C4 /dev/mapper/sdb1_crypt 758 /lib/systemd/systemd-fsckd 759 fsck.ext4 -a -C4 /dev/mapper/sdb1_crypt
Long enough, in fact, that I began to wonder if I could tell what it was doing. (The volume in question is exported via iSCSI from a Synology NAS and fsck is still running long after the machine has otherwise finished booting up, so I have ordinary shell access.)
Not all of the strange Hindi phrases I've encountered can be traced to awkward translations. Here are some that I find baffling all by themselves.