RazvanM - Slashdot User

Submission + - The Story of a Simple and Dangerous Kernel Bug

Submitted by

RazvanM

on Saturday August 29, 2009 @11:41PM

RazvanM writes: "At the beginning of this month the Mac OS X 10.5.8 closed a kernel vulnerability that lasted more than 4 years, covering all the 10.4 and (almost all) 10.5 Mac OS X releases. This article presents some twitter size programs that trigger the bug. The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works. Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."

Submission + - The hairy state of Linux filesystems

Submitted by

RazvanM

on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @01:08AM

RazvanM writes: "Do the OSes really shrink? Perhaps the user space (MySQL, CUPS) is getting slimmer, but how about the internals? Using as a metric the number of external calls between the filesystem modules and the rest of the Linux kernel I argue that this is not the case. The evidence is a graph that shows the evolution of 15 filesystems from 2.6.11 to 2.6.28 along with the current state (2.6.28) for 24 filesystems. Some filesystems that stand out are: nfs for leading in both number of calls and speed of growth; ext4 and fuse for their above-average speed of growth and 9p for its roller coaster path."

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