Multi-Kernel Drifting

https://luqman.ca/blog/multi-kernel-drifting/

by zdw • 4 years ago

102 41 4 years ago

luqman.ca

bfung• 4 years ago

The title bait’ed my inner troll.

The author did not disappoint at the very end of the article.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/multi-track-drifting

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Deja vu...

devmor• 4 years ago

I've compiled this script before...

jiggawatts3• 4 years ago

It always blows my mind to see people trying to do something that is Windows native on Linux.

Would you automate your Linux build using VB Script? Why not?

When in Rome, do as the Romans do!

Citrix actually purchased a company like this and sold their Linux-based virtual appliance that did one thing and one thing only: create Windows disk images for running Windows applications.

It was the stupidest thing I had ever seen that was packed full of clever solutions to problems that didn’t need solving.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 years ago

Eh, it depends on context. If all your build servers are *nix boxes, no point in spinning up an NT machine just for building those images. In a Microsoft shop, controlling *nix boxes with powershell is probably a decent idea.

thrwawy74• 4 years ago

I actually had a neighbor who worked for Citrix and this describes him to a T. He was such a clever waste of time. I miss you Skip.

throwaway092233• 4 years ago

trying to do something that is Windows native on Linux.

You realize this blog post is about Illumos, not Linux, right?

Illumos isn't nearly as well-polished.

A lot of these types of tasks are easier on Linux than they are on Windows native.

bragr• 4 years ago

You realize he's not using Linux, right?

FTA: I had already gotten it working with QEMU under KVM on Linux but wanted to port it to propolis on our illumos distro, Helios.

nix23• 4 years ago

Whait linux is polished compared to illumos? Man you need a reality check.

encryptluks23• 4 years ago

Would you automate your Linux build using VB Script? Why not?

That is a completely different concept and not at all relative to building deployment images. They are not compiling Windows here on Linux.

Creating build images doesn't necessarily require anything that is Windows specific. An unattended XML file can be added to a disk image without needing to boot into a Windows environment. The challenge with Windows automation though is to get an optimized image you need WIM mounting and modification. Linux even has a WIM tool, but the tools like DISM are not really there or the Windows ADK. I'm sure DISM can be reverse-engineered and then doing automation in Linux would make a lot of sense actually since it would be less-resource intensive. Spinning up a container or Linux distro is usually magnitudes faster than a Windows machine, and Windows automation in itself sucks comparatively. I would definitely pick doing automation on Linux whenever possible as long as it gets the job done well.

jiggawatts3• 4 years ago

This is precisely the attitude that I'm arguing against.

No, Linux is not superior in any way for Windows install image automation!

Why the heck would you reverse engineer and port the DISM tool, when the DISM tool already exists!?.

Windows has a built-in set of free tools for automating image updates, integrations, and builds.

E.g.: you can mount a WIM image offline (without booting a VM or needing a container), and inject updates, software, configuration, or even drivers.

This is 100% supported an Will Just Work. It takes minutes, not hours.

The article is the rough equivalent of trying to build a Linux install image using Windows, via some broken FUSE EXT3 driver the causes blue-screen crashes of the entire host OS, then spending a month trying to fix that instead of just using Linux to solve the task like a normal person.

PS: I do 99.9% of my work with Windows. The one time in my career I had to inject drivers into a Linux install image, I created a Linux VM and just used that. (I had to make a version of XenServer that could boot from a MPIO FC adapter during install time, even if a path was down. Fun stuff.)

haileys• 4 years ago

Would you automate your Linux build using VB Script? Why not?

No but Windows builds are automated with Unix tools like Perl and Make :)

andai• 4 years ago

This is true. Tried compiling Windows XP recently and the use of Perl caught me off guard!

delta_p_delta_x• 4 years ago

It always blows my mind to see people trying to do something that is Windows native on Linux.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do!

This seems to be a running trend for people with a deep dislike for anything Windows-native–they tend to force non-Windows paradigms on Windows, and when this breaks, blame Windows for not being 'POSIX-compatible'.

Probably also led to the explosion of tools like Cygwin, Msys2, Mingw, etc.

drekipus• 4 years ago

What's the windows paradigm in this example?

Tools like cygwin, etc, exist because there (was) absolutely nothing like it on windows back in the day, or it was locked behind some paid for editor, or most often it relied on obscure hacks that were hard to read.

"find which file contains this string" is a non-windows paradigm.

ilyt• 4 years ago

Think the point there is to not pay for windows license to make some images

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 years ago

I suppose that's an argument for running the same OS everywhere; you can't accidentally build against OmniOS if your run all Helios. I wonder if it would be possible to mark the package with the distribution that it was built on to avoid this kind of thing? ("You just tried to run an OmniOS program/module on Helios; are you sure you want to do that?")

hamburglar3• 4 years ago

Spitballing here, but one could imagine a compatilibity assurance mechanism that baked in a hash of all the structs and function signatures in the kernel interfaces in some well-defined way that fixes the ordering. Runtime check when loading the module, bail if the hashes don’t match.

spijdar3• 4 years ago

I haven't tracked OpenSolaris/illumos in a while, but it seems kind of bizarre that different "distros" of illumos would have different kernel ABIs. To me that's the definition of a different OS, in the way OpenBSD was a divergent fork of NetBSD. Reminds me (in a negative way, if I'm totally honest) of stories of old proprietary unixes/BSDs from the 80s/90s, with really minor but incompatible changes to a shared BSD/SysV source.

Anyway, I guess there's a lot of practical problems in defining either a new ABI or ABI version in the ELF headers, so the different distros just sort of pretend to all be "Solaris". If I remember, Solaris (de facto?) disallows static linking, and uses dynamic linking with libc to solve the ABI compatibility problem. Wouldn't help stuff like kernel modules/FUSE, I reckon.

The biggest question to me is why Helios is using the FUSE kernel module from OmniOS. If the kernels were strictly identical, this makes sense, but if they're not, it seems weird. Since Helios is a secret Oxide thing (?), guess it's a mystery.

msizanoen• 4 years ago

The Linux kernel actually has something like that: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kbuild/modules.html#m....

It's used on Debian to support out-of-tree modules: https://kernel-team.pages.debian.net/kernel-handbook/ch-vers...

Calamityjanitor• 4 years ago

I've been running OmniOS on my home NAS since 2015. In theory you should be able to compile and install any open source software on OmniOS/Illumos, but let’s be honest, the world assumes you’re running linux. Devs already have enough issues supporting different linux distros, sometimes you’ll see specific BSD support which can help but good luck if your issue is Illumos distro specific. Sometimes fixing these issues can be interesting and offer teaching in fundamental differences in unix.

squirrel• 4 years ago

A debugging tour de force all the way down the stack, from Unix command to reinstall to truss and dtrace to C code to assembly to analysing data structures! Leaky abstractions indeed.

teekert• 4 years ago

I love seeing Hugo with the Terminal theme in the wild. [0]

[0] https://github.com/panr/hugo-theme-terminal

Multi-Kernel Drifting

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