Category Archives: OS

Operating System – UNIX/Linux, Solaris

Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 on MacOS

Posted on April 9, 2023 by daveti

The recent post from Hackaday on Borland Turbo C/C++ [1] managed to trigger my nostalgia, when I needed to pass some national programming testing in C as an undergrad in China over 20 years ago, and it was Borland Turbo … Continue reading →

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Ubuntu Kernel Build Again

Posted on November 7, 2019 by daveti

I wrote two blog posts about Linux kernel build on Ubuntu [1,2]. There is also an official wiki page talking about the same thing [3]. Still, things are broken when I try to create a homework assignment for my class. … Continue reading →

Posted in IDE_Make, Linux Distro, OS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Syscall hijacking in 2019

Posted on February 25, 2019 by daveti

Whether you need to implement a kernel rootkit or inspect syscalls for intrusion detection, in a lot of cases, you might need to hijack syscall in a kernel module. This post summorizes detailed procedures and provides a working example for … Continue reading →

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Kernel build on Nvidia Jetson TX1

Posted on December 31, 2018 by daveti

This post introduces native Linux kernel built on the Nvidia Jetson TX1 dev board. The scripts are based on the jetsonhacks/buildJetsonTX1Kernel tools. Our target is JetPack 3.3 (the latest SDK supporting TX1 by the time of writing). All the scripts … Continue reading →

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Kernel Code Execution Time Measurement (kcetm)

Posted on May 20, 2018 by daveti

This post mainly talks about the correct usage of tsc counters provided by Intel x86/x86-64 architectures to measure the Linux kernel code execution time. Most of the content here is borrowed/inspired from [1]. Note that this is NOT a post … Continue reading →

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Rowhammer Pine64

Posted on April 29, 2018 by daveti

Rowhammer attacks have been well known, and gotten a lot of publications already. However, we notice that most rowhammers happened on x86 architecture due to the easy access to clflush from the user space. ARM architecture (both ARMv7 and ARMv8) … Continue reading →

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Running Multics on Linux (Fedora 27)

Posted on January 17, 2018 by daveti

This post follows the “Multics Simulator Instructions”[1] (with some tweaks) to setup Multics simulator dps8m and run Multics on my Fedora 27. Other Linux distro (Ubuntu/Debian/Raspbian) may need some changes but basically work the same way. Experience the cutting-edge secure … Continue reading →

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USB gadget functionalities in Android

Posted on July 14, 2017 by daveti

I started working on Android stuffs this summer. While I mainly work on the USB layer within the Linux kernel, I do sometimes need to look into the Android framework, to see if I could achieve my goal from the … Continue reading →

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Understanding kcov – play with -fsanitize-coverage=trace-pc from the user space

Posted on June 1, 2017 by daveti

kcov is a kernel feature used to support syzkaller[1]. To provide the code coverage information from the kernel itself, the GCC compiler was patched to instrument the kernel image[2]. The kernel itself was also patched to enable this feature where … Continue reading →

Posted in OS, Security, Stuff about Compiler | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

getdelays – get delay accounting information from the kernel

Posted on September 6, 2016 by daveti

Top may be the most common tool in use whenever a preformance issue is hit. It is simple, quick and dumb. Besides the heavy metal stuffs like perf and gprof, another really useful and simple tool is getdelays, which provides … Continue reading →

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