A story of Docker, QEMU, and memfd_create()

Last year I stumbled across a problem with the execution of a Docker container in a CI environment. The interesting case was that this is a container for a foreign architecture, which is supported by the --platform option and there are even official images on Docker Hub for this.

Initially, the problem presented itself like this:

$ docker run -it --rm --platform linux/arm64 [...] arm64v8/ubuntu:jammy
root@d6fb5c478cb6:/# ps
Error, do this: mount -t proc proc /proc

This means the ps(1) command could not run in this Docker container. At first I trusted the error message and thought that /proc might really not be mounted. However, that is usually taken care of by Docker and this following check confirmed that it is in fact mounted:

root@d6fb5c478cb6:/# mount | grep proc | head -n1
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

Well, now what is actually the problem here with running a Docker container for a foreign architecture?

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New profile picture generated by AI

A few weeks ago I decided to replace my profile picture. I use the same picture across almost all the social media sites. Now a part of the new profile picture is also the header image in this blog’s design. Here is this new profile picture:

My new profile picture. A description follows inline in the post.

It looks very stylish on the first glance, but if you look closer you will notice that it contains imperfections. The reason for this is that it was generated by AI without any further editing. While I did some basic design work in the past, I am not an illustrator and would never be able to come up with something like this myself. I do not even know how which tools to use these days.

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Follow this blog via ActivityPub on Mastodon

All new posts on this blog are now published via ActivityPub to Mastodon and all other compatible decentralized social sites in the Fediverse. With the help of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, this was a simple setup.

You can now follow the posts of this blog on the account @posts@raimue.blog. The widget below will help you to subscribe from your instance, but you could also just search for the address.

The ActivityPub plugin will only publish posts to this address, so do not expect any other interaction from this account. My personal account remains @raimue@hachyderm.io.

This is an experiment and I mainly enable it to play around with the new feature. Mastodon and the Fediverse still have their shortcomings due to the decentralized nature, but it also enables new ways to share content and interact.

The accounts below are already following the account of this blog. Follow now to add yours to the list!

We value your privacy now, but maybe not later

Everybody knows these modal dialogs when visiting a website for the first time that ask you to accept cookies and consent to being tracked by third-party advertising networks. It actually became a habit for me to always click through these things and reject any kind of tracking or use of my personal information except for the “required” cookies.

But today, I came across this dialog on atlasobscura.com with the title We value your privacy:

I highly doubt Atlas Obscura actually values my privacy when the only option is to “accept”. By the way, if you actually follow to the privacy policy to “withdraw consent”, access to the content is still blocked by this modal dialog on the next visit. Leaving technical details aside, for the layperson there is in fact no other choice than clicking “accept”, if they want to get access to the website.

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