I misinterpreted the title, I clicked because I thought it was literally about how we should stop building and designing more actual databases, which is something that I agree with and is perhaps a hotter take than the one in the article.

There are hundreds of subtly different database out there, but there are only a dozen or two that really ought to exist. So stop making new databases for every little thing folks. They are

It says it's the boot volume, not necessarily the equivalent I guess of /boot on Linux where it's exclusively for boot related things.

You may want to email HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) as it seems you're shadow banned.

You want the principles of operations manual (that's the ISA reference) if it's seriously troublesome stuff, but usually there is no need for anything like that. Oftentimes issues are things like the system being Big Endian. If it were z/OS and not Linux you'd need to deal with a different object format and some weird calling convention stuff (even if sticking with z/OS Unix, it's not a SysV calling convention, and it's not ELF, but it is POSIX and SuS), and also EBCDIC interop possibly, so slightly more difficult, but still doesn't usually require doing any assembly. A lot of common nix software will compile and run just fine with no changes.