BPF in GCC

Posted Sep 16, 2020 16:56 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
Parent article: BPF in GCC

> static __u32 (* bpf_get_prandom_u32)( void ) = ( void *) 7;

This reminds me of something James Mickens wrote in 2013:

> What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY.

See https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightw...

BPF in GCC

Posted Sep 17, 2020 7:16 UTC (Thu) by matthias (subscriber, #94967) [Link] (3 responses)

Many thanks for the link. This is really great.

The trials of the systems programmer

Posted Sep 17, 2020 16:13 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (2 responses)

I'll say. There are months worth of QOTWs in it. E.g:

You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

The trials of the systems programmer

Posted Sep 17, 2020 17:23 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

Is there a name for this style of writing?

It's bizarre hyperbole from the get-go. The few articles I've read by Mickens suggests he can get away with it. Quite a feat!

The trials of the systems programmer

Posted Sep 17, 2020 22:33 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I'd be fine with calling it Mickensian.

His talks (at least those I've seen) are also done with similar turns of phrase.