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Showing posts from April, 2023

My SerenityOS presentation at a local tech meetup

I gave a presentation about SerenityOS, and system calls at a local tech meetup last week. It took about 20 hours to prepare for the presentation. The original plan was to discuss also subjects other than system calls, but I quickly realized I ought to shave off most of those. KISS, you know, better to focus on one thing.  I needed to dive deep into the nitty-gritty details of how system calls work in Linux. I had to spend some time refreshing my memory by re-reading the Linux Insides book , just to make sure I got the comparison right between SerenityOS syscalls and Linux kernel syscalls. I took a good look at the sysinfo system call Linux kernel code and peeked at its syscall table. It was some intense stuff! When I started preparing the presentation, Serenity still supported i686 (32-bit Intel) CPU architecture and the system calls used the interrupt-based invocation. That changed just in time for my talk, which was fantastic for my presentation since fast system calls are easier t