back to article Facebook sets Linux kernel tools free

After years of making the world more open and connected – to everyone's delight – Facebook recently moved on to bringing the world closer together. Amid its pursuit of global compression, the data harvesting biz nonetheless developed a handful of difficult-to-pronounce Linux kernel components to make the open source operating …

  1. onefang

    Some of these things have been around for many years. At least those things that I have heard of, no idea about the ones I have not heard of. Btrfs for example has been in the Linux kernel for almost a decade, and started in Oracle.

    1. MyffyW Silver badge

      Been around for many years

      Yes, but OMD are still one of my favourite synth bands of all time.

      If you leave ... being about the most perfect accompaniment to Molly Ringwald's prom-night dilemma in Pretty in Pink

      1. dmacleo

        Re: Been around for many years

        man thats a blast from the past, like that song and not thought of it in decades.

      2. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: Been around for many years

        > Yes, but OMD are still one of my favourite synth bands of all time.

        There's also Jeb Kerbal's band... "Orbital Maneuvers in the Dark"

        1. Glen 1

          Re: Been around for many years

          >orbital manoeuvres in the dark

          I believe there is a cover band that does electronica versions of their songs. Lead by bloke called mechjeb

  2. Christian Berger

    Hmm, usually when a company does that...

    ... it means "We are sick of maintaining our own crap, let's give it to the community so they can maintain it for free".

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

      And get some brownie points for being open-source-friendly.

      1. TVU Silver badge

        Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

        "And get some brownie points for being open-source-friendly"

        ^ This, and are you watching this good example to follow, Oracle?

    2. Bronek Kozicki

      Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

      It's not a bad thing, though. If I were a CTO at a technology company, approach "let's give it to the community so we have more potential maintainers and external input" would be my default.

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

      "let's give it to the community so they can maintain it for free"

      But has Linus accepted into the mainstream kernel?

      1. onefang

        Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

        "But has Linus accepted into the mainstream kernel?"

        As I mentioned above, at least some of it had been accepted into mainstream Linux kernel, years ago.

  3. stiine Silver badge

    oomd - for reigning in developers who shouldn't be

    Why would you need to run oomd on a system where your applications are in cgroups? Can someone explain this? Or is it a matter of left-hand, right-hand nil communicado?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: oomd - for reigning in developers who shouldn't be

      The OOM kills processes at random.

      OOMD will let you kill a specific process, possibly allowing you to fix the problem.

      FB after all is famously a user of "saturate, log, and leak" so choosing which process to restart under such circumstances would be most useful.

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

    "The software allows bytecode to run in response to specific events for the purpose of modifying and extending kernel behavior."

    Just what everyone needs - send bytecodes to your somebody's kernel and get them executed with, presumably, kernel privileges.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

      I'm not sure that's what it means, but since that is what is stated, maybe. To me it sounds like some node.js kid attached some dodgy "listener" to a hacked insmod. Yeh, you're probably not going to run this... ever.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

        Yeah, no.

        man bpf(2) will make this clearer.

        BPF is what libpcap understands and exposes as tcpdump/wireshare filter syntax.

        eg. 'dst port 80'

        eBPF allows you to have a stat collection buffer in kernel space, and then collect the stats from userspace.

        This is huge for lots of tedious bit twiddly reasons, see https://blog.cloudflare.com/epbf_sockets_hop_distance/ for someone with a better explanation.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

      I think this suggests some interesting possibilities for kernel modification on the quiet - that's a potential hook for the NSA.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

        Already on it.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

      Its not as bad as all that.

      EBPF is a verified safe subset of instructions that can be attached to certain kernel paths.

      Think a very fine grained ptrace with much lower overhead...

      As this is a rather esoteric subject, I can recommend a very nice blog post series from

      Cloudflare on the subject.

      This is by far the most accessible of the series https://blog.cloudflare.com/epbf_sockets_hop_distance/

    4. JLV

      Re: Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

      Hey at least it’s not Poettering

  5. Jay Lenovo

    For a change

    Kudos to Facebook for leaking information purposely intended to be shared.

  6. _IRIX

    It's a trap!

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