Operating systems are a huge pile of technical debt

The blog post discusses the complexities and challenges developers face with software largely built upon legacy systems, using a specific troubleshooting incident involving Sysdig and Linux as a case study. The author, Luca Marturana, recounts an issue where a customer's statsd metrics weren't being captured due to php-fpm not attaching appropriate container metadata when using Alpine Linux, which relies on the fork system call rather than the more modern clone. The root cause was identified as a parsing oversight in the Sysdig tool, which only accounted for clone events, leading to a solution that involved modifying the code to parse fork and vfork events as well. This anecdote highlights the broader theme that operating systems, while reliable, carry a form of technical debt that requires engineers to navigate historical quirks and maintain compatibility with older software behaviors, underscoring Linus Torvald's principle of "never break userspace."