421
The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
A detailed walkthrough of the Linux boot process from power button to kernel initialization
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
422
An Update on TinyKVM
Hey all. TinyKVM was open-sourced this february and since then I’ve been working on some things that are very much outside of the scope of…
423
The Journey Before main()
A while back, I worked on a RISC-V-based userspace simulator for fun. In doing so, taught myself a lot more than I wanted to know about what happens in-between when the Kernel is asked to run a program, and when the first line of our program’s main function is actually executed. Here’s a summary of that rabbit hole.
424
Making a micro Linux distro (2023)
A guide on building a simple Linux distribution from scratch. Detailed guide on building the kernel and the init process. Finally, a little distribution is built with u-root that is capable of connecting to the Internet.
425
Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
426
/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
427
Linux Capabilities Revisited
Technical blog by Stephan Berger (@malmoeb)
428
Building a message queue with only two UNIX signals
Have you ever asked yourself what if we could replace any message broker with a very simple one using only two UNIX signals? Well, I'm not surprised if you
429
The death of thread per core
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
430
Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi
Android developer, author of Combian 64 and Dosbian
431
K8s with 1M nodes
This is an effort to create a fully functional Kubernetes cluster with 1 million active nodes.
432
Reverse engineering iWork
So you don't have to.
433
How to stop Linux threads cleanly
Stopping a Linux thread is a surprisingly annoying affair. In this post I present common pitfalls and some solutions -- although no truly satisfactory method exists.
434
Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them
Programming languages have rapidly evolved in recent years. But in software development, the new often meets the old, and the scaffolding that OS gives for running new processes hasn’t changed much since Unix.
435
Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
436
Modern Linux tools
Programming notes for Unreal Engine, Houdini, Game Development, Math, & Graphics
437
JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
438
Multi-Core by Default
On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.
439
Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…
440
Resizeable Bar Support on the Raspberry Pi
While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB. In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5. Unlike most…
441
Why is everything so scalable?
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
442
I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms
443
Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
444
Under the hood: Vec<T>
Let's look at Vec<T> to get a better understanding of its inner structure.
445
CPU cache-friendly data structures in Go
False sharing, AoS vs SoA, random access, branch prediction: re-measured with go test -bench on two machines. Some claims held, some didn't.
446
Why we need SIMD
tl/dr: it can deliver big performance speedups at modest area cost
447
Memory access is O(N^[1/3])
In computer science, we often compare the efficiency of algorithms by describing their runtime as a function of the size of the input. Sorting is O(n * log(n)), meaning that sorting a list of N items takes an amount of time proportional to the number of items multiplied by its logarithm. Matrix multiplication is…
448
The QNX Operating System
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
449
Matrix Core Programming on AMD GPUs
In this blog post, we walk through how to use Matrix Cores in HIP kernels, with a focus on low-precision data types such as FP16, FP8, and FP4, as well as the new family of Matrix Core instructions with exponent block scaling introduced in the AMD CDNA™4 architecture. Through code examples and illustrations, we…
450
Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board