The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST UPATE TO THE UPDATE: Similar log entries are now found in another system log that is more persistent, see the article here . UPDATE: This is still vulnerable on current versions of macOS 10.13.3 when encrypted an ALREADY EXISTING unencrypted APFS volume
Recent incident where Uber car was involved in an accident where a cyclist got killed has sparked many comments and opinions. Many blame…
With the Meltdown and Spectre fiascos , performance isn't a very hot topic at the moment. In fact, with Linux v4.15 released, it is one ...
Linux TCP Tracepoints, and using them via bcc/eBPF.
Managing complexity within an application is one of the key challenges for any software developer. Cleanly reconciling new features with existing architectures is something we strive for.
I recently found myself dealing with TCP load balancing for a project and I've come to think that generic TCP proxies can't be implemented without substantial pain and how it makes TLS terminating proxies a bad idea.
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
Recently I did a userspace implementation of the Host Identity Protokoll (HIPv2, RFC 7401) with the upcoming Diet Exchange (HIP DEX, IETF draft 6) . Doing so, I've learnt a lot about raw socktet programing under Linux and here I want to share a few things with you.
Quote: we DID get a perfectly usable C++ dialect which is also 100% safe against memory corruption and against memory leaks. Another Quote: we can (and often...
In January 2017, we presented results to the European Commission on a FP7project called SyncFree, where we were tasked with a large-scale evaluationof the Lasp programming system. In this evaluatio...
There’s fast and there’s fast. This post is about Anna*, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that’s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unpr…
In this article I give a brief tour of a program analysis technique called symbolic execution. As the title indicates, I aim to explain both the intuition behind the technique, and also the details of a simple implementation. My intended audience is professional programmers who have no background in program analysis.
Context A few years after I created the Elastic Binary Trees (ebtree) , I started to get some feedback from users who needed to use the...
In the past few years, PostgreSQL has advanced a lot in terms of features, performance, and scalability for many-core systems. However, o...
How to script in any language thanks to rootless containers and BINFMT_MISC.
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.
A transcript of the talk I given in 2018 about the state of embedded programming in Rust.
You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson…
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardwa…
I play World of Warcraft . Being a Linux user requires me to run this in Wine , a Windows API translation layer. While Wine is continuously improving, its performance in Direct3D games still leaves much to be desired.
