Christian Brauner

@cbrauner.bsky.social

Maintains #Linux #kernel stuff. #systemd, #LXC, #LXD and a few other things.

Very excited to be founding @amutable.com with @pid1.bsky.social and @cbrauner.bsky.social. We are joined by one of the strongest Linux teams I could imagine building important foundational technologies that enable whole new capabilities built on trust and integrity.

Amutable@amutable.com · 7mo ago

Today we announce Amutable and our mission to deliver determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems. Amutable is founded in Berlin by @chrskhl.net , @cbrauner.bsky.social and @pid1.bsky.social. Read the announcement: amutable.com/blog/introdu...

Ringing in 2026, I'm thrilled to join @amutable.com with @cbrauner.bsky.social, @chrskhl.net, and @pid1.bsky.social — alongside a wildly talented founding engineering team — to redefine what we expect for infrastructure integrity, declarative systems, compliance, and trust.

Amutable@amutable.com · 7mo ago

Today we announce Amutable and our mission to deliver determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems. Amutable is founded in Berlin by @chrskhl.net , @cbrauner.bsky.social and @pid1.bsky.social. Read the announcement: amutable.com/blog/introdu...

4/n Since usermode helpers are either children of the system_unbound_wq workqueue or kthreadd we know that the file descriptor table is empty and can thus always use three as the file descriptor number.

2/n There are tricky race-windows that cannot be easily closed by userspace. There's various ways like looking at the start time of a process to make sure that the usermode helper process is started after the crashing process but it's all very very brittle and fraught with peril.

1/n Oh yeah, I already mentioned this a while ago but I also added support for pidfds in Linux coredumps. /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern has been extended so userspace can instruct the kernel to install a pidfd for the crashing process into the usermode helper process, e.g., systemd-coredump.

So a while ago we did pidfds for AF_UNIX sockets. Alexandr Mikahlitsyn did all of the heavy lifting. Specifically we added SO_PEERPIDFD and SCM_PIDFD. They are analogues to SCM_PEERCRED and SCM_CREDENTIALS.