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Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 82 posts.
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Atomic Commit in SQLite (2007)
An important feature of transactional databases like SQLite is "atomic commit". Atomic commit means that either all database changes within a single transaction occur or none of them occur. With atomic commit, it is as if many different writes to different sections of the database file occur instantaneously and…
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Reading privileged memory with a side-channel
Posted by Jann Horn, Project ZeroWe have discovered that CPU data cache timing can be abused to e...
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HTTP Analytics for 6M requests per second using ClickHouse
One of our large scale data infrastructure challenges here at Cloudflare is around providing HTTP traffic analytics to our customers. HTTP Analytics is available to all our customers via two options:
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Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing
One of my favorite Amazon Leadership Principles is Customer Obsession. When we launched AWS Lambda, we focused on giving developers a secure serverless experience so that they could avoid managing infrastructure. In order to attain the desired level of isolation we used dedicated EC2 instances for each customer. This…
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How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
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Minimodem – General-purpose software audio FSK modem (2016)
Minimodem can play and capture audio modem tones in real-time via the system audio device, or in batched mode via audio files.
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Chromium Security: Site Isolation
Site Isolation is a security feature in Chrome that offers additional protection against some types of security bugs. It uses Chrome's sandbox to make it harder for untrustworthy websites to access or steal information from your accounts on other websites.
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
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Differential Synchronization (2009)
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
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Linkers and Loaders (1999)
The text in these files is the unedited original manuscript. M-K has fine copy editors, who have fixed all the minor typos, spelling, and grammar errors in the printed book, but if you come across factual errors I'd still appreciate help getting all the details of linking and loading as complete and correct as…
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Floating-Point Determinism (2013)
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
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Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With ...
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Today's CPU vulnerability: what you need to know
Posted by Matt Linton, Senior Security Engineer and Pat Parseghian, Technical Program Manager [Google Cloud, G Suite, and Chrome customers...
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Mitigating Spectre with Site Isolation in Chrome
Posted by Charlie Reis, Site Isolator Speculative execution side-channel attacks like Spectre are a newly discovered security risk for web...
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Measuring context switching and memory overheads for Linux threads
In this post I want to explore the costs of threads on modern Linux machines, both in terms of time and space. The background context is designing high-load concurrent servers, where using threads is one of the common schemes .
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DNSFS – Store files in others' DNS resolver caches
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
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AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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Why Create a New Unix Shell?
Please read this update instead: Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) . This page is obsolete!
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How the Go runtime implements maps efficiently without generics
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
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Vectorized Emulation: fuzzing at 2 trillion instructions per second
This is the introduction of a multipart series. It is to give a high level overview without really deeply diving into any individual component.