After nearly two years of development and private beta testing, I’m excited to share that Ghostty 1.0 will be publicly released in December 2024 as an open-source project under the MIT license. In this blog post, I want to restate the broader goals of the Ghostty project and outline the specific…

This is the text format of a talk I did for Zig Showtime. If you'd rather watch the video, you can find it on YouTube: Zig Showtime: Ghostty. The video also includes a Q&A session at the end which I did not include in this post. Hello! I'm excited to talk today about Ghostty. Ghostty is a brand new…

sailing During long passages, our daytime sailing occupations include: cooking, cleaning, doing fixes on the boat and brainstorming on future projects. We don't have a tight schedule for day watches, we hand the wheel to the other as we get tired. At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how…

Free Software Needs Free Tools June 4, 2010 Translations into Arabic (لغة عربية), French (Français), Persian (فارسی), Simplified Chinese (简体中文), Spanish (Español), Swedish (Svenska), and Turkish (Türkçe) are also available. A 16 minute talk on the topic of the article is available a WebM video and…

Minimal Version Selection Revisited Dec 24, 2024 In this post, I want to highlight one aspect of Go-style minimal version selection that I have missed completely at first. Maybe you missed it too? If

Kernel booting process. Part 1. From the bootloader to the kernel If you read my previous blog posts, you might have noticed that I have been involved with low-level programming for some time. I wrote

A Simple ELF Let's write a simple program for Linux. How hard can it be? Well, simple is the opposite of complex, not of hard, and it is surprisingly hard to create something simple. What is left when

This document looks at the boot process of general purpose Linux distributions. It covers the status quo and how we envision Linux boot to work in the future with a focus on robustness and simplicity.

Let’s have a look how traditional Linux distributions set up /boot/ and the ESP, and how this could be improved. How Linux distributions traditionally have been setting up their “boot” file systems ha

This is a guest post written by Daan De Meyer, systemd and mkosi maintainer Almost 7 years ago, Lennart first wrote about mkosi on this blog. Some years ago, I took over development and there's been a

During the past weeks we have been working on a new feature for systemd, that we’d like to introduce to you today. At the same time as it helps us to substantially decrease the footprint of a minimal

Myth: systemd is monolithic. If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries. These binaries all serve different tasks, and are neatly separated for a

The logo image was taken from Reddit. It is a living document, last update: November 2024. Your contributions are welcome! There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on

Adopting Wide Event-style instrumentation has been one of the highest-leverage changes I’ve made in my engineering career. The feedback loop on all my changes tightened and debugging systems became so