GitzTalk

Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities

Orkamungus — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 23:00:00 +0000

The new year starts with a fairly nasty security disclosure

Bugs were discovered last year on most modern CPU and could be used to gain information from system parts of the memory (Meltdown) or from arbitrary locations in userspace memory (Spectre). Now don't panic dear hitchhikers, security patches are rolling …

Gaming on Linux with a Windows Virtual Machine using OVMF

Orkamungus — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Back in 2014, I made a small guide on KVM virtualization that showed how VFIO-VGA could be used to pass a video card to a virtual machine from the virtualization host. I've only used Windows in virtual machines since that time. I've also transitioned from Nvidia to AMD for the …

Using dnsmasq with VMware Workstation

Orkamungus — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Having changed the internal DNS server of my home network recently, I started having DNS issues on VMWare Workstation guests that are using NAT network connections. Somehow, guests could not get routes to Internet hostnames. The problem persisted after reinstalling VMware. QEMU and VirtualBox guests using similar configuration and running …

Linux Containers (LXC) on Debian

Orkamungus — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Linux Containers¹ (LXC) (official site) leverage the functionality of cgroups (documentation) and namespaces to isolate processes in the context of the operating system. In a very simplified way, LXC is a type of OS virtualization included with the Linux kernel.

One of the advantages of OS type virtualization is …

What happened in September 2014?

Orkamungus — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

A lot has happened this month and since I did not find time to publish anything, here's a list of various arbitrarily selected subjects.

Bash Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271)

A severe vulnerability has been found in the popular bash shell interpreter. Most distributions have issued security advisories to inform …

TRIM on Debian Jessie with LVM on dm-crypt/LUKS

Orkamungus — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

I installed Debian Jessie on my Thinkpad T410 with a new SSD last month. To prevent disk performance degradation, I had to enable the TRIM functionality. TRIM tells the SSD that it can clean clusters that are unalocated by the file system.

When using simple configuration with only one file …

Just How Fast KVM Really Is?

Orkamungus — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0400

To continue from my previous post on QEMU/KVM, I ran a bunch of additional tests and recorded the results. The aim was to provide a ballpark estimate for the performance of QEMU/KVM compared to native performance. I also took the time to test with VMware Player and Oracle …

Gaming in a Virtual Machine?

Orkamungus — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Warning: This guide is obsolete. Please use the Gaming on Linux with a Windows Virtual Machine using OVMF guide instead.

Gaming in a virtual machine?

In case you're wondering, I'm not talking about games like Angry Birds. If someone asked me this question years back, I'd have chuckled. Desktop type …

Online at last!

Orkamungus — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hi, I'm Orkamungus and I'm a technology enthusiast.

I made this website to share with others information on various technology facets. Since I speak both English and French, I will try my best to translate most of the content hosted here. When another language is available, there will be a …