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23 posts
WSL2 doesn't borrow a distro's kernel — Microsoft maintains its own fork, patched specifically for the virtualized environment WSL2 runs in, and ships it independently of both Windows and any Linux distro's own kernel.
Announced by Linus Torvalds in September 2024 and landing in kernel 6.12, PREEMPT_RT ended nearly two decades as an out-of-tree patchset — real-time Linux no longer needs a custom kernel build.
Released December 17, 2003, the 2.6 series brought in-kernel preemption, NPTL threading, SELinux, and support for far larger process/user counts — the foundation the kernel built the next two decades on.
A minimal but complete walkthrough of writing, building, loading, and communicating with a Linux kernel module.
Why and how to build a custom FreeBSD kernel configuration, from copying GENERIC to installing the result.
How procfs and sysfs expose live kernel state as ordinary files, and the specific paths worth knowing for debugging a running system.
How eBPF lets sandboxed, verified programs run inside the kernel, and why that changed what's possible for tracing, networking, and security tooling.
How GEOM's graph of providers and consumers underlies partitioning, RAID, encryption, and disk labels on FreeBSD.
How the VFS layer lets ext4, XFS, Btrfs, NFS, and procfs all answer to the same read/write/open calls.
A stage-by-stage walkthrough of how a FreeBSD machine goes from power-on to a login prompt, and where to intervene at each step.
A walk through what actually happens between powering on a Haiku machine and reaching a usable desktop, and where things most commonly go wrong along the way.
A stage-by-stage tour from power-on firmware through GRUB, the kernel, initramfs, and systemd reaching a running system.
Haiku's kernel wasn't built as a Unix variant with threading bolted on — it was designed around threads as the fundamental unit of execution from the very beginning.
How cgroup v2's unified hierarchy replaces v1's tangled controller mounts, and how to read and write limits directly through the filesystem.
How each of the Linux kernel's namespace types isolates a specific global resource, and why containers are just processes with a curated set of them.
Released to retail October 25, 2001, Windows XP was the first consumer edition of Windows built on the NT kernel rather than the MS-DOS-based 9x line — ending the split between Windows 9x/Me and Windows NT/2000 for good.
A complete walkthrough reading, changing, and persisting kernel runtime parameters — with a few of the most commonly tuned examples explained, not just listed.
Released March 14, 1994 at 176,250 lines of code, version 1.0 was the point Linus Torvalds and the community considered the kernel stable enough for production use.
How the Windows kernel represents processes as containers of handles and a security token, and the tools to inspect both live.
FreeBSD panicked and rebooted. Here's how to get the crash dump kgdb actually needs, and how to read it well enough to find the responsible driver or subsystem.
Released January 19, 2003, FreeBSD 5.0 began dismantling the single 'Giant Lock' that had serialized most of the kernel, after years of SMPng project work.
How character and block device drivers register with the DOS kernel through a standard request-header protocol, loaded declaratively from CONFIG.SYS.
Released December 11, 2022, Linux 6.1 became the first kernel version to officially accept Rust as a second language for kernel development, alongside C.