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The Bootloader That Said OK: A Verified Boot That Verified Nothing
A board with verified boot enabled happily booted a tampered kernel and printed OK. The only clue was one missing word on…
RB Sep 16 · 12 min
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Debug Stories
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Debug Story: A Spurious Interrupt Storm That Disabled a Shared IRQ
A shared, level-triggered interrupt line was disabled after a "nobody cared" spurious interrupt storm. Here is how the kernel detects it and…
RB Sep 11 · 9 min
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The SPDX Tasks That Refused to Die: A BitBake Parse-Order Mystery
An image recipe inherited nospdx, yet the SPDX tasks ran anyway and the build failed on a missing rootfs-packages.json. The culprit was…
RB Sep 5 · 12 min
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Debug Story: A Circular Locking Dependency in a Driver
A lockdep circular locking dependency warning appeared with no hang. Here is how the AB-BA lock inversion between two driver mutexes was…
RB Aug 24 · 8 min
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An IRQ Storm on an Embedded Gateway
On an embedded gateway, Wi-Fi kept dying and never came back until a reboot. The kernel log named an IRQ storm, and…
RB Jul 28 · 9 min
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Debug Story: A Hung Task That Froze an Embedded Board
A debug story from an embedded Linux board: a hung task froze the system. How khungtaskd reports it, reading the blocked-task stack,…
RB Jun 29 · 10 min
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Debug Story: Sleeping Function Called From Invalid Context in a Kernel Driver
A kernel debug story: how we root-caused a "sleeping function called from invalid context" BUG caused by kmalloc(GFP_KERNEL) under a spinlock, and…
RB Jun 24 · 8 min
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Don’t jump to the solution
One of the most valuable skills an engineer can develop is also one of the least discussed: the ability to properly define…
RB Jun 13 · 4 min
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