System Notes: Expeditions

A record of technical explorations across computer systems and software internals.

Will an SD card lose data after 9 years of storage?

TL;DR: yes

What Do runc's Release Names Say?

Qu Yuan, Attack on Titan, and the global container infrastructure

Seventeen Years of Misunderstanding

How a 2008 DRM triggered supply chain attack paranoia in 2025

The Kernel Trilogy, Volume III: Undefined Behavior

Beyond the boundaries of the specification, finding another possibility, and its cost.

The Kernel Trilogy, Volume II: Interrupt Return

After a system reset, all states are lost, except for those memories written to non-volatile storage.

The Kernel Trilogy, Volume I: The Trap

When the exception first occurred, I didn’t yet know that some errors cannot be caught.