Linux documentation is patchy sometimes. Reading it can be a frustrating experience, especially when you’re just starting out. But fear not, there is plenty of information available! It’s just about knowing where to start digging for it.

When you take a look at the memblock allocation API for the first time, you might feel a bit overwhelmed. You see a bunch of functions with “memblock_alloc” or “memblock_phys_alloc” prefixes, coupled together with all possible combinations of start/end addresses and NUMA node requirements that you can think of. But...

Today is the last day of my Outreachy internship. So, it’s a perfect time to take a moment and reflect on how this project went and what was it like for me to develop it.

After a very hectic time full of kernel patches and moving boxes [1], I sent the first version of memblock simulator to linux-mm. Now, it’s a good time to explain what is this all about and why such thing is needed in the first place.

Less than five seconds – that’s how long you need to wait to get your Linux kernel up and running. But it’s hardly an idle time for Linux – the system has to process configuration, perform architecture-specific setups and initialize many subsystems.