I’m continuing to reflect on the past four years with Hubris — April Fool’s Day was, appropriately enough, the fourth anniversary of the first Hubris user program, and today is the fourth anniversary of the first kernel code. (I wrote the user program first to help me understand what the kernel’s API wanted to look like.)

Of all of Hubris’s design decisions, there’s one that gets a “wait what” response more often than any other. It’s also proving to be a critical part of the system’s overall robustness. In this post, I’ll take a look at our 13th and oddest syscall, REPLY_FAULT.

We found a neat bug in Hubris this week. Like many bugs, it wasn’t a bug when it was originally written — correct code became a bug as other things changed around it.

I thought the bug itself, and the process of finding and fixing it, provided an interesting window into our development process around Hubris. It’s very rare for us to find a bug in the Hubris kernel, mostly because it’s so small. So I jumped at the opportunity to write this one down.

This is a tale of how two features, each useful on its own, can combine to become a bug. Read on for details.

I do a lot of electronics projects in my spare time, and I tend to try to make reusable parts to save myself effort in the future. Because I have to order ingredients in certain quantities, I often wind up with more than I need for my project.

So I’ve opened a Tindie store, called Overengineered Widget Laboratories. Right now there’s one product in the store, called Keypad:GO. See, I built a sculpture last summer that needed to interact with people through a phone-style keypad. The keypad interface part of it seemed like something other people could use, so I made a few extras. This is a very easy way to interface a keypad or small keyboard to an embedded electronics project, because it handles all the basics for you — matrix scanning, debouncing, key matrix collisions, etc.

It will also help you reverse engineer the keypad’s circuit, because often cheap keypads arrive without good documentation. In the tiny flash of the embedded microcontroller, I’ve packed a setup wizard that will walk you through the process of setting up the keypad of your choice. All you need is a terminal program. This is honestly my favorite part, and I demonstrate it in the video below.

Since I started running this site in 2011, I’ve adhered to some principles to make it fast, cheap, and privacy-respecting.

• As few third-party cross-domain requests as possible – ideally, none.
• No trackers (which tends to follow naturally from the above).
• Use Javascript but don’t require it – the site should work just fine with it disabled, only with some features missing.
• No server-side code execution – everything is static files.

Out of respect for my readers who don’t have a fancy gigabit fiber internet connection, I test the website primarily on slower, high-latency connections – either a real one, or a simulated 2G connection using Firefox’s dev tools.

I was doing an upgrade of my httpd2 software recently and was frustrated at how long the site took to deliver, despite my performance optimizations in the Rust server code. To fix this, I had to work at a much higher level of the stack – where it isn’t about how many instructions are executed or how much memory is allocated, but instead how much data is transferred, when, and in what order.

On a simulated 2G connection, I was able to get load times down from 11.20 seconds to 3.44 seconds, and the total amount of data transferred reduced from about 630 kB to about 200 kB. This makes the site faster for everyone, whether you’re rocking gigabit fiber or struggling to get packets through.

In this post I’ll walk through how I analyzed the problem, and what changes I made to improve the site.

tl;dr: Check that your RSS reader is using an HTTPS URL, because the HTTP one will start redirecting soon, and you probably want to find out if it breaks.

Edit from four days later: I’ve flipped the switch on this and, from the logs, it doesn’t seem to be messing anybody up.

It’s been just about four years since I finally got HTTPS and HTTP/2 working for this site. During that time, I’ve seen most incoming traffic from humans transition over to encrypted connections. (HTTP/2 connections are also significantly faster for both my server, and your user experience, than earlier editions.)

You might wondering what I mean by “traffic from humans.” Well, it turns out the vast majority of my remaining unencrypted HTTP traffic (ye olde port 80) is from a combination of:

• RSS readers (80%)
• Shady crawler bots that don’t check robots.txt (15%)
• Google, for some reason – I’ve poked them about it (~4%)
• Requests that may be from actual humans (1%ish)

Since I deployed httpd2 back in 2020, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to turn off publicfile, the HTTP server I’ve used since time immemorial. publicfile has served well, but the code is as archaic as its protocol support, its license makes it difficult to maintain, and (frankly) I’m less excited about appearing to support DJB and his software ecosystem these days.

So, I figure I will do the following:

1. Respond to all HTTP requests with a 301 redirect to HTTPS (…something publicfile can’t actually do out of the box), and
2. Turn on the Strict Transport Security header.

For best results, check your RSS reader today and verify that it’s using an HTTPS URL. It should follow the redirect when I enable it, but, you never know.