The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Linux / Unix

Chris Down

chrisdown.name

Linux SRE and developer living in London, England, currently helping Meta scale to over 3 billion users.

Linux / UnixDevOps / SRE / infrastructureOS / kernelPerformance / optimization

’15’20’25
Posts
43 from 1 Jun 2011 to 23 Mar 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://chrisdown.name/feed.xml

2026 1

  1. Debunking zswap and zram myths

2025 1

  1. Preventing outages with pkill's new --require-handler flag

2024 1

  1. Creating controllable D state (uninterruptible sleep) processes

2022 1

  1. Signals in prod: dangers and pitfalls

2021 1

  1. tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64

2020 5

  1. Programming/gaming with the Kinesis Advantage 2
  2. mutt support for Gmail's "mute" feature
  3. psi-notify: Alerting before CPU/memory/IO becomes oversaturated
  4. Unprivileged userland containers without root or userns
  5. "1195725856" and other mysterious numbers

2019 2

  1. Linux memory management at scale
  2. 大規模システムでの Linux のメモリ管理

2018 3

  1. The curious case of stalled squashfs reads
  2. In defence of swap: common misconceptions
  3. スワップの弁護：よくある誤解を解く

2017 2

  1. Adding power related targets to systemd
  2. cgroup v2: Linux's new unified control group hierarchy

2016 8

  1. Simulating service cold cache starts with eBPF/strace + oflag=nocache
  2. Toggling Yubikey (and other input devices) on/off on a timeout
  3. X freezing as "systemd-logind: got pause for [...]"
  4. Cleaning, muxing, and extracting subtitles using ffmpeg and the Python srt library
  5. SRECon Europe 2016
  6. Arch Linux on the T460s — first thoughts
  7. VirtualBox modules not loading in Arch Linux after upgrade to Linux 4.4.3
  8. Lessons learned running SSL/TLS at scale

2015 5

  1. Auto-merging successful builds from Travis CI
  2. Removing namedtuple docstrings for Sphinx
  3. Folding Python docstrings in vim
  4. How to remove a custom video mode in VirtualBox
  5. Mandarin learning resources and advice

2014 5

  1. Migrating Jekyll to Amazon S3 and CloudFront
  2. Using multiple isolated SSH keys with agent forwarding
  3. Unlocking storage devices locked using a password made of scancodes
  4. Finding out why a package was held back with apt
  5. Comments on the new Stack Exchange Android app

2013 7

  1. Backing up EFS and modem on the N7100/t03g
  2. Securely automating rsync to archive sensitive files
  3. Best practices when designating exit codes in command line programs
  4. Fixing stale SSH sockets in tmux
  5. Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins
  6. Archiving deleted mails in Dovecot without using a namespace
  7. Setting up a local GitHub mirror with cgit, gh-mirror, and git daemon

2011 1

  1. Running fsck on filesystems inside a partitioned image