Author: Michael Lucas

After far too long, I have finished a first draft of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. Sponsorships are now closed.

I’m asking tech reviewers to get any comments to me by 15 October 2022. That’s four weeks. It might seem tight, but experience shows that people either get their comments to me immediately, or wait until the last possible weekend. I’m not complaining–I do exactly the same thing. Please return any comments either a) in plain text, with enough context that I can find them when page numbers change, or b) as annotations directly on the PDF.

My tech reviewers are now in their third decade of winning the prize for “most likely to use many different PDF readers.” A file that works for one won’t work for another. I work around this by distributing three PDFs of the manuscript, each identical in contact but prepared differently. Everyone should be able to find one that works for them.

If you’re interested in doing a tech review, please drop me an email (mwl at mwl dot io) saying who you are, why you would make you a good reviewer, and that you won’t share the manuscript. (Piracy is bad, but having my name on an unreviewed and thus certainly incorrect document is horrifying). I’ll ignore responses that can’t follow those instructions, because whenever I don’t I get difficult-to-decipher feedback. (I have previously received PostScript diffs, and… no. Just no.)

I’ll be turning my attention to the Prohibition Orcs copyedits next. Then it’s back to the Epic Giant Fiction Project, and another tech book, title TBA.

I just finished the ‘non-native filesystems’ part of “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems.” I wouldn’t say I’ve finished the hard part, but I have finished the “intertwined to an unholy degree” part.

Why have I spent months on five chapters? Because everything in the core storage system of any Unix is intertwined to a nearly unholy degree. To understand filesystems you must understand partitioning, but to understand why Unix uses partitions as it does you need to understand filesystems. I have to meticulously disentangle facts so that I can start explanations at the bottom of the storage stack, but add in enough higher-level details exactly when you need them so you can make sense of why the bottom layers work as they do.

Otherwise, you’d look at computers and think “Wow, this whole thing is stupid.” Don’t get me wrong, the whole thing IS stupid, but it’s your job to understand the stupidity and I don’t need to be rubbing your nose in it.

Have I written on these before?

Yes, many times.

Does that make them easier to write?

BWAHAHAHAHA. No.

Can I use the earlier edition of Absolute OpenBSD to guide me?

Sure, except that the book is ten years old and every detail within is suspect and must be triple-checked against the current state of the software and oh by the way that book doesn’t even mention GPT or FUSE so burn it all down. AO2e is a checklist of things that will annoy me.

The good news is, the sections that remain are fairly tidy. They’re not standalone, but they are less incestuously intertwined with other topics.