Linux, in its many forms, has always worn transparency as a badge of honor. Unlike proprietary systems where code is hidden ...

Live USBs are critical lifelines for persistence in Tails. Now, Tails 6.0 alerts users when underlying storage suffers ...

ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

Why do the above features use netlink instead of system calls, ioctls or proc filesystems for communication between user and kernel worlds? It is a nontrivial task to add system calls, ioctls or proc ...

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...

I've been covering the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design campaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies since its planning stages. Starting from scratch, in less than three ...

Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of ...

Many market sectors, such as financial trading, defense, industry automation and gaming, long have had a need for low latencies and deterministic response time. Traditionally, custom-built hardware ...

A vDSO (virtual dynamic shared object) is an alternative to the somewhat cycle-expensive system call interface that the GNU/Linux kernel provides. But, before I explain how to cook up your own vDSO, ...

Have you ever heard the following? "Welcome to the team! Here's a list of 15 applications to install, the instructions are in the team room, somewhere. See you in a week!" Or: "What do you mean it ...

The kernel this. The kernel that. People often refer to one operating system's kernel or another without truly knowing what it does or how it works or what it takes to make one. What does it take to ...