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EWONTFIX
Personal blog · ewontfix.comprogrammingsystems
EWONTFIX is a personal blog at ewontfix.com about programming and systems. Since 2012, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “Broken by design: systemd”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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45mentions?
36HN people?
2012–2025first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Broken by design: systemd5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-02-09
- Systemd has 6 service startup notification types, and they're all wrong3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-02-27
- Vfork considered dangerous3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-18
- NULL considered harmful3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-04
- /17/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-21
- /14/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-01-10
- Multi-threaded setxid on Linux2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-15
- /3/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-03
- 32-bit x86 Position Independent Code – It's That Bad2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-15
- 32-bit X86 Position Independent Code – It's That Bad2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-21
What Hacker News says?
> In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult [...]. Hard disagree. Audio mixing is not difficult[1]. The Linux kernel guys were right - it does not belong in the kernel. The userspace story however, has been a complete shitshow for decades . I think Pipewire mostly fixed that? Not sure, sometimes I still have to log out and back in to fix audio. The funn…
Comment linking /14/
on “Apple needs a Snow Sequoia”Submitted Broken by design: systemd as a story · 172 points
HN discussionThis is a mostly-untrue statement because it makes unreliable assumptions about the host system. It depends on the vm.overcommit_memory setting and the programmer should never make assumptions about why or when malloc might fail. Read more on Rich Felker's excellent blog post here: http://ewontfix.com/3/
Comment linking /3/
on “fork() can fail”Submitted 32-bit x86 Position Independent Code – It's That Bad as a story · 136 points
HN discussionOTOH, Linux's setuid and similar interfaces are per-thread, not per-process as required by POSIX and as what most people would expect--particularly in the context of software security. glibc and musl have to emulate the POSIX behavior, and doing it correctly is extremely tricky. See https://ewontfix.com/17/ Linux's various APIs used for container frameworks also tend to be per-thread, not per-process; that can be bo…
Comment linking /17/
on “Swift System Is Now Open Source”Submitted Broken by design: systemd as a story · 116 points
HN discussionThe only issue I'm having with systemd is that it's taking over the role of PID 1, with a binary produced from an uncountable SLOC, then doing even more song and dance to exec itself in-place on upgrades. Here's a PID 1 program that does 100% of all of its duties correctly, and nothing else: #define _XOPEN_SOURCE 700 #include <signal.h> #include <unistd.h> int main() { sigset_t set; int status; if (getpid() != 1) re…
Comment linking /14/
on “Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)”Submitted Systemd has 6 service startup notification types, and they're all wrong as a story · 48 points
HN discussionHere are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway. * Blogs with a math focus: http://blog.sigfpe.com http://bit-player.org http://mathr.co.uk/blog/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/ * Blogs with a programming languages focus: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com https://bluishcoder.co.nz http://blog.ezyang.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted Multi-threaded setxid on Linux as a story · 19 points
HN discussionYou must be joking. What meritocracy? The guy who wrote systemd had already a major failed projects under his belt. PulseAudio rings a bell? Every reasonable person understand that separation of concerns is a good thing. Systemd does the exact opposite. Few articles to be familiar with regarding systemd: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/software-development-can... "The same can be said of the init systems in Linu…
Comment linking /14/
on “System Down: A systemd-journald exploit”Submitted The worst of time64 breakage as a story · 12 points
HN discussionWell yes and no. I like the good parts of SystemD (not the parts this video is talking about). For me there are 3 things that SystemD gets right: - no shell scripts for service configurations - no forking services (no need for daemon mode anymore) - logging and service management is tightly coupled (this is arguably good with some bad parts, required CPU for logging with systemd is not great) And the rest is just pu…
Comment linking /14/
on “Systemd: The Good Parts”Submitted NULL considered harmful as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRich Felker, the lead developer of musl libc, uses make to generate his ewontfix.com blog. See http://ewontfix.com/Makefile
Comment linking /Makefile
on “Build Tools – Make, no more”Submitted Stubborn and ignorant use of int where size_t is needed as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCancellation is always such a big issue regardless of language or environment, and whether it's due to a timeout or some other action. In C, when using threads and thread cancellation there are a lot of subtleties involved: https://ewontfix.com/2/ Even in Haskell where there's generally a focus on well designed abstractions, asynchronous cancellation can fail due to badly written code that wants to catch all excepti…
Comment linking /2/
on “Three bugs in the Go MySQL driver”Submitted 32-bit x86 Position Independent Code – It's that bad (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://ewontfix.com/14/ is one of the classic posts here, but it deserves a good rebuttal, not the straw-man one included. (The starting point I'd make is, if init were really as simple as purported, why isn't it built-in to the kernel? Why not simply skip all the kernel code to reparent children to init, and have children die immediately instead of becoming zombies if their parent has exited? Why not remove all the…
Comment linking /14/
on “Debian Dropping the Linux Standard Base”Submitted The Worst of Time64 Breakage as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think the proper title is: Linux Process and Threads Don't Mix. The Linux syscall interface exposes certain functionalities that are much more easy to reason about at the process level such as namespaces, capabilities, seteuid and so on. However these syscalls all operate on the thread level (since the kernel treats threads pretty similarly to processes). Therefore in order to perform these operations safely you n…
Comment linking /17/
on “Linux Namespaces and Go Don't Mix”Submitted EWONTFIX – A blog about long standing bugs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOne of musl libc guys wrote quite convincing article about NULL: http://ewontfix.com/11/ There was also discussion on musl mailing list (I don't know is this best link to it): http://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2013/01/09/1
Comment linking /11/
on “Modern C [pdf]”Submitted Systemd has 6 service startup notification types, and they're all wrong as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"Linux has an elegant and beautiful design when it comes to threads" - unifying threads and processes does simplify some things, but it makes it extremely hard to change a process -level property such as the effective user/group id of a process: https://ewontfix.com/17/ .
Comment linking /17/
on “Raw Linux Threads via System Calls (2015)”Submitted NULL considered harmful as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLinux has very non Posixy ideas about threads, which are basically processes with shared memory. libc is supposed to present a Posix compatible interface. See [1] for some examples. Go simply exposes raw syscalls. [1] http://ewontfix.com/17/
Comment linking /17/
on “C Runtime Overhead”Submitted Vfork considered dangerous as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt may not be deprecated, but it's a rather unsafe interface: http://ewontfix.com/7/
Comment linking /7/
on “The “too small to fail” memory-allocation rule”Submitted Thread cancellation and resource leaks as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
