Top all-time · #8747
Red Hat Research
Company blog · research.redhat.com/blogsystemssecurity
Red Hat Research is the company blog at research.redhat.com, writing about systems and security. Since 2015, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “RISC-V extensions: what's available and how to find them”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Red Hat Research blog posts on systems research, such as Unikernel Linux (UKL), EU Horizon funding for open source, and security work like Plundervolt. Commenters link them as sources and background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- RISC-V extensions: what's available and how to find them2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-27
What Hacker News says?
Saw a talk a couple years ago about similar techniques being used to identify marine mammals. https://research.redhat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/RRQ-V...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/02/RRQ-Vol1-4.pdf
on “BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound”Submitted Can we control time in operating system design? as a story · 88 points
HN discussionhttps://research.redhat.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?”Submitted RISC-V extensions: what's available and how to find them as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou may like ... https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-w... I don't think extensions are a "mess", certainly they're much less of a mess than x86 (a low bar, I know ...)
Comment linking /blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
on “GCC 14.1”Submitted Fuzz Testing of REST API as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI use POWER8 hardware at Red Hat (supplied by IBM[1]) and it certainly does rock. It helps that I don't have to pay the electricity bills. I just wish the hardware was more available. There is precisely one, barely affordable, non-IBM POWER8 system available to buy[2] (if you have $3-4k burning a hole in your pocket). Where are the development boards? [1] http://research.redhat.com/powerlinux-openpower-development-.…
Comment linking /powerlinux-openpower-development-hosting/
on “The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon”While I don't know for a fact if MSRs were used in this case, I was at a presentation a few months back where a security researcher (Kit Murdock) used under-voltaging to get data out of a secure enclave (SGX). "Plundervolt is an attack on Intel SGX enclaves, which are trusted execution environments. We showed that we can get secrets out of SGX enclaves by lowering the CPU voltage while it is performing calculations.…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2019/12/RRQ-Vol2-1.pdf
on “Linux to begin tightening up ability to write to CPU MSRs from user-space”The nice thing with password managers is you only have to remember the one password. That means it's easy to make that password very strong. And then it just comes down to your key derivation. https://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secdictprotect The documentation here is pretty unclear. I'm not a keypass user and I don't see what the default settings are. The recommendation though is "1 second" with Argon2 th…
Comment linking /blog/article/how-expensive-is-it-to-crack-a-password-derived-with-argon2-very/
on “Ask HN: Alternatives to 1Password”I'm not aware of any chips, even in development, that will genuinely have full RVA23 support. If you'll settle for "near enough" then my betting is we'll have SiFive P650/P670 hardware first ( https://www.sifive.com/cores/performance-p650-670 ). There are some other development boards coming (sorry, under NDA!) that should have near-RVA23 + Xeon-like performance and we should get them in very end 2025 / early 2026.…
Comment linking /blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
on “RISC-V RVA23 Profile: A major milestone”Profiles are rolled up collections of RISC-V extensions[1]. RVAxx defines a set of standard extensions you can expect to be present in "application processors" (which is fairly loosely defined but is basically non-embedded stuff that you might run a full Linux on.) [1] I wrote a quite detailed paper about RISC-V extensions last year: https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-w...
Comment linking /blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
on “RISC-V Announces Ratification of the RVA23 Profile”FWIW I wrote this article a while back all about RISC-V extensions and how they work at a low level: https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-w... page 22 in this PDF: https://research.redhat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/RHRQ_...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2023/12/RHRQ_November2023_WEB.pdf
on “RISC-V Is Sloooow”I agree the naming is annoying. However the extensions aren't too hard to understand. They are much more regular than on other architectures. I wrote a deep dive into them here: https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-w... Also groups of extensions are consolidated into Profiles, so in practice you don't really care about individual extensions. You'll only care that the hardware supports eg RVA23.
Comment linking /blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
on “RISC-V and Floating Point”I think he is doing other things these days https://research.redhat.com/blog/project_member/ulrich-drepp...
Comment linking /blog/project_member/ulrich-drepper/
on “Strlcpy and strlcat added to glibc 2.38”RedHat has been looking at Linux-as-unikernel since 2018, https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/unikernel-linux-ukl... > The Unikernel Linux (UKL) project started as an effort to exploit Linux’s configurability.. Our experience has led us to a more general goal: creating a kernel that can be configured to span the spectrum between a general-purpose operating system, amenable to a large class of applications, and…
Comment linking /blog/article/unikernel-linux-ukl-moves-forward/
on “Building a unikernel that runs WebAssembly – part 1”The EU supports open source projects, for example through the Horizon program which distributes 95 billion euros: https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/look-to-the-horizon...
Comment linking /blog/article/look-to-the-horizon-europes-increased-focus-on-funding-open-source-research-is-creating-new-opportunities/
on “ACM Software System Award Given to seL4 Microkernel”
