https://macworks.dev/tags/free-software/Recent content in Free Software on MacWorksHugoenhttps://macworks.dev/docs/today/engineer-blogs-2026-04-19/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://macworks.dev/docs/today/engineer-blogs-2026-04-19/<h1 id="engineering-reads--2026-04-19">Engineering Reads — 2026-04-19<a class="anchor" href="#engineering-reads--2026-04-19">#</a></h1> <h2 id="the-big-idea">The Big Idea<a class="anchor" href="#the-big-idea">#</a></h2> <p>Software engineering is inherently political, whether you are building capability-based microkernels, managing toxic open-source communities, or resisting corporate exploitation through unionization. True technical excellence cannot exist in a moral vacuum; the legal, social, and labor structures behind the code determine its ultimate value to society.</p> <h2 id="deep-reads">Deep Reads<a class="anchor" href="#deep-reads">#</a></h2> <p><strong>Porting Helios to aarch64 for my FOSDEM talk, part one</strong> · Drew DeVault · <a href="https://drewdevault.com/blog/Helios-aarch64/">Source</a> The author explains the process of porting the Helios microkernel, written in the Hare language, to aarch64 in order to present a slidedeck directly from a Raspberry Pi 4. The initial focus is on the bootloader, leveraging an EFI stub and device trees instead of SoC-specific complexities. A major challenge discussed is the EL2 to EL1 exception level transition on real hardware, which differed from the QEMU emulator defaults. Systems developers working on bare-metal ARM boot sequences should read this to understand practical EFI memory mapping and MMU configuration.</p>