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marcan.st
Personal blog · marcan.stsystemshardware
marcan.st is a personal blog at marcan.st about systems and hardware. Since 2014, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 65 times, most often “Debugging an evil Go runtime bug”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Debugging an evil Go runtime bug20 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2017-12-04
- Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-02-13
- Rescuing a broken NTFS filesystem3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-08-28
- Untangling iOS PIN code security (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-18
- /transf/ftdi_evil.png2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-23
- /about/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-23
- Hacking and upgrading the Korg Kronos2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-01
- Crossflashing the Fujitsu D2607 (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-06
- Safe Hacking (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-26
What Hacker News says?
There are wifi drivers; you just have to install them separately because they use broadcom chips. It's a proprietary blob. The other things do work, but it requires special packages and you'll need an external keyboard while installing. It's a pain to install, for sure, but it's not insurmountably difficult to get it installed. Apple Silicon chips are arguably more compatible with Asahi Linux [1], but that's largely…
Comment linking /2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
on “Apple M3 Ultra”Submitted Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead as a story · 1116 points
HN discussionThe same compiler (mis-)feature was also the cause of spurious crashes in Go applications (diagnosed about a month ago: https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/ ). Linus's comment is fun: So yes, It's a terminally broken compiler from hell. I assume gentoo has applied some completely broken security patch to their compiler, turning said compiler into complete garbage.
Comment linking /2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
on “The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug as a story · 498 points
HN discussionIt's not surprising that other pieces of golang have incredibly broken assumptions, I know this particular one was discovered independently by many people: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/71ab9fa312f8266379dbb358b9... https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
Comment linking /2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
on “I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug: From heat guns to kernel compiler flags (2017) as a story · 206 points
HN discussionFrom https://marcan.st/about/ "Hello! I’m Hector Martin and like to go by the nickname “marcan”. I currently live in Tokyo, Japan as an IT/security consultant by day and a hacker by night. For some definition of day and night, anyway." Hacker for hire basically. This project was started via crowdfunding enough monthly sponsors (overnight from his previous reputation and interest in this project) and is somewhat half…
Comment linking /about/
on “Asahi Linux for Apple M1 progress report, August 2021”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug (2017) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionYou're assuming Apple's ARM chipsets are like other embedded ARM chipsets. They aren't. Things are much cleaner and quite well designed. Storage-wise, you can't brick the machine by wiping NVMe. You can always recover via DFU mode, which you can also use from another Linux machine by using idevicerestore (no need for macOS). This is very much unlike your typical Android phone, which is indeed a flimsy mess that will…
Comment linking /2011/01/safe-hacking/
on “Asahi Linux for Apple M1 progress report, August 2021”Submitted Safe Hacking (2011) as a story · 38 points
HN discussionNothing is too sporadic to be reproduced, you just haven't found how to reproduce it yet :) I once solved a once-in-a-petabyte bug at Google, when I was still working there. One of our systems ran in two data centers on the same data, and the cross-check was detecting a record offset mismatch but not a data mismatch (?!); retrying the process almost always fixed it. Long story short, there was a buffer overread in G…
Comment linking /2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
on “Print this file, your printer will jam (2008)”Submitted Crossflashing the Fujitsu D2607 (2016) as a story · 28 points
HN discussion> Meanwhile, donations and pledges kept slowly decreasing, and have done so since the project launched. Not enough to spell immediate doom for my dream of working on Asahi full time in the short term, but enough to make me wonder if any of this was really appreciated. The all-time peak monthly donation volume was the very first month or two. It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had. I think…
Comment linking /2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
on “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2”Submitted Rescuing a broken NTFS filesystem as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMartin Hector (@marcan42) from the established hardware hacking group fail0verflow has to say about the situation: https://marcan.st/2016/03/untangling-ios-pin-code-security/ Essentially you can just automate the backup/restore of the eMMC flash storage and brute force the PIN. :)
Comment linking /2016/03/untangling-ios-pin-code-security/
on “U.S. Says It May Not Need Apple’s Help to Unlock iPhone”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCase in point: I tried to shrink an NTFS filesystem offline with ntfsresize (offline!) and this happened: https://marcan.st/2015/10/rescuing-a-broken-ntfs-filesystem/ This is a tool that is part of most Linux installers and tested by huge numbers of people, and yet things still went wrong. Shrinking filesystems is hard, and this was offline. Shrinking filesystems online is much harder.
Comment linking /2015/10/rescuing-a-broken-ntfs-filesystem/
on “Wipe and reinstall a running Linux system via SSH (2017)”Submitted Untangling iOS PIN code security (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThey always have rejects. Actually, that's almost certainly an unfinished wafer. Modern flip chips don't look like that finished - you have an array of pads and power distribution covering all the cool features. I think there's a good chance that wafer doesn't have any metal layers, or only M1 at most. It looks the same as the chips I've delayered and removed all or almost all of the metal layers from. For example,…
Comment linking /transf/hollywood_die.jpg
on “5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds”Submitted Hacking and upgrading the Korg Kronos as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's been proved by reverse engineering the FTDI drivers and annotating the code. It exploits some edge case in which the counterfeit device does not behave exactly like the original. https://marcan.st/transf/ftdi_evil.png
Comment linking /transf/ftdi_evil.png
on “FTDI driver kills fake FTDI FT232s”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttp://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/ftdi-driver-kills-fake-... marcan: "In case anyone was still wondering if this is intentional and malicious... Straight out of their driver. Function/variable naming and comments mine. https://marcan.st/transf/ftdi_evil.png I figured out what's going on with the real chips: turns out their EEPROM is written in 32bit units. Writing to even addresses is ignored; the value is buffer…
Comment linking /transf/ftdi_evil.png
on “FTDI driver kills fake FTDI FT232s”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI heard of a HTML5-based alternative some time ago called the "ugoira HTML5 zip player". It uses a ZIP file of PNG/JPG files and renders the animation using JavaScript onto a <canvas>. There's a detailed slide deck talking about it [1] and the source code is available too [2]. [1] https://marcan.st/talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/ [2] https://github.com/pixiv/zip_player
Comment linking /talks/2014_pixiv_ugoku_player/
on “Introducing GIFV”Submitted Untangling iOS PIN code security (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's funny that this exact question is mentioned in marcan's "I'm leaving Asahi Linux" blogpost, haha. > And, of course, “When is M3/M4 support coming?” https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l... It's just amusing to me that Linux users since the beginning of time have been working hard on ensuring the maintainers of their software get upset at them and quit working on their software. Over decad…
Comment linking /2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
on “Asahi Linux Still Working on Apple M3 Support, M1n1 Bootloader Going Rust”Submitted Debugging an evil Go runtime bug (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn fact that is an issue Go hit in the past: https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
Comment linking /2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
on “Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD”Submitted Crossflashing the Fujitsu D2607 as a story · 1 points
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