June 23, 2024 ❖ Tags: writeup, reverse-engineering, linux, operating-systems, hardware
This blog post is about a GNU/Linux rabbit hole I fell down in the belief I was chasing a mighty adventure. It was not nearly as adventurous as I had hoped, but I am nonetheless posting about it in case this information is helpful to someone else. My story begins with a purchase of four wireless gamepads from 8BitDo. I had done little research outside of scrolling past a few positive comments about their products on the Fediverse and viewing enough of their marketing materials to see that the controller I was interested in was supported by SteamOS. That was enough to encourage me to put in an order, so I did, and patiently awaited their arrival. When they were finally in my hands, I plugged two of them into my media center, hoping to play some Mario Kart with Oli. They were clearly working in some capacity because RetroArch pops up a toast when it detects that a controller has been plugged in, but something was wrong. I twiddled the analog sticks and I mashed the buttons. Nothing seemed to happen.
July 31, 2017 ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, operating-systems, c, linux
It seems that static linking is back in style, or at least popular among all the hip new programming languages of today. I don't have anything against statically linked binaries, nor do I have a problem with larger executables, but I've noticed that the acceptable size for an executable is a lot larger now than it was a few years ago; that is, the new kids on the block have significantly more leeway than their predecessors. For example - a C program that spits out "hello world" is 7 KB when statically linked to musl. It's 12 KB when dynamically linked to glibc. The same program in D, where the reference compiler doesn't allow dynamic linking to the standard library, is 896 KB. A blog post I read recently about certificate chain verification in Go made a point of praising the toolchain for being able to spit out a binary that was "less than 6 MB!" I'm being more facetious than with my D example, as this was statically linked to an SSL-capable web server, but 6 MB is a little over half the size of a fully-functioning operating system. I'm not so interested in why we settle binaries the size of a few videos, but instead I'd like to look at why they're that large to begin with. To peer in and see what wealth of information is stored inside, and how certain programming languages make use of that information.