The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
This is a post describing my involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V (unofficial and not endorsed by Debian at the moment) and announcing the availability of the repository (still very much WIP) with packages built for this architecture. If not interested in the story but you want to check the…
Linux has an elegant and beautiful design when it comes to threads: threads are nothing more than processes that share a virtual address space and file descriptor table. Threads spawned by a process are additional child processes of the main “thread’s” parent process. They’re manipulated through the same process…
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…
This article aims to provide an overview of the Zend Virtual Machine, as it is found in PHP 7. This is not a comprehensive description, but I try to cover most of the important parts, as well as some of the finer details.
As part of a never-ending quest to explore the CoreCLR source code I stumbled across the intriguing titled ‘HillClimbing.cpp’ source file. This post explains what it does and why.
Absolute memory bandwidth figures tend to look fairly large, especially for GPUs. This is deceptive. It’s much more useful to relate memory bandwidth to say the number of clock cycles or inst…
Update: In the HN discussion, awalton mentioned you can set CPUID flags in VMWare. Simply adding cpuid.7.ebx = "-----------0--------------------" to the vmx file will disable SMAP. Late last year, I upgraded my old MBP to the 2016 model with a Skylake processor. As I was debugging a kernel exploit, it turned out that…
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
It seems that every day, some computer monkey comes up with a new and more groovy serialization protocol. In the beginning, there was ASN.1 and XDR, and it was good. I think ASN.1 came first, and l…
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
Whilst writing a previous blog post I stumbled across the .NET Interpreter, tucked away in the source code. Although, it I’d made even the smallest amount of effort to look for it, I’d have easily found it via the GitHub ‘magic’ file search:
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
“iOS HFS Normalized UNICODE names, APFS now treats all files as a bag of bytes on iOS. We are requesting that Applications developers call the correct Normalization routines to make sure the file name contains the correct representation.”
In the original version of this post, I claimed that gryadka , which claims to be built on top of a Paxos-backed CAS register, was incorrect by providing a “counter-example”.
Just over 2 years ago Microsoft open-sourced the entire .NET framework, this posts attempts to provide a ‘Hitchhikers Guide’ to the source-code found in the CoreCLR GitHub repository.
This is the first post in a series about JIT compilers. The plan is to take a simple input language and develop some interpreters and JITs for it, in roughtly increasing degree of complexity. It's my hope that by the end of the series readers will have a good understanding of what it takes to develop a JIT compiler…
That's a interesting question I'm willing to spend some of my time on. Someone at StumbleUpon emitted the hypothesis that with all the impr...
In this post we'll discuss the second argument on why the epoll() is broken. The problem is best described in an LWN comment by Foom :
I’m very excited to announce that today I’m open-sourcing atool I’ve been working on for several months at Google.It’s called Bloaty McBloatface, and it lets...
PostgreSQL have supported Hash Index for a long time, but they are not much used in production mainly because they are not durable. Now, ...
This guide is mainly intended for expert programmers familiar with Java concurrency, but unfamiliar with the memory order modes available in JDK 9 provided by VarHandles. Mostly, it focuses on how to think about modes when developing parallel software. Feel free to first read the Summary .
