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Zig builds are getting faster
Andrew Kelley famously (or infamously, depending on your views) said "the compiler is too damn slow, that's why we have bugs." 1
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
452
The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit
As is true for everything, a lot of things need to happen for anything to happen, and so it’s true for this blogpost as well. Out of all of these everything that needed to happen, 3 are these:
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The best worst hack that saved our bacon
No-one really likes engineering war stories, but this one's relevant because there's a moral to it. I've talked before about defining technical debt as technical decisions that provide immediate value, but with long-term negative impact if they aren't cleaned up. Sometimes introducing technical debt
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Mind the encryptionroot: How to save your data when ZFS loses its mind
While ZFS has a well-earned reputation for data integrity and reliability, OpenZFS native encryption has some incredibly sharp edges that will cut you if you don't know where to be careful. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, standing in a pool of my own blood and tears after thoroughly lacerating myself…
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Safe zero-copy operations in C#
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
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Not all OCuLink eGPU docks are created equal
I recently tried using the Minisforum DEG1 GPU Dock with a Raspberry Pi 500+, using an M.2 to OCuLink adapter, and this chenyang SFF-8611 Cable. After figuring out there's a power button on the DEG1 (which needs to be turned on), and after fiddling around with the switches on the PCB (hidden under the large metal…
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Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
A little walkthrough on an image decoder algorithm's high-level optimization, in order to make more digestable for a 6502 processor.
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VMScape and why Xen dodged it
ETH Zürich’s new VMScape attack hit KVM and VMware, but Xen’s microkernel-like design kept it out of reach.
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The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming
Read THE WEIRD CONCEPT OF BRANCHLESS PROGRAMMING on sanixdk.xyz
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Beyond OpenMP in C++ and Rust: Taskflow, Rayon, Fork Union
Most C++ and Rust thread pools run 10x slower than OpenMP on fork-join workloads. Fork Union closes the gap to 20% with 300 lines, dodging mutexes and CAS.
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How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
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Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
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Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
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How fast is Go? Simulating particles on a smart TV
The challenge, simulate millions of particles in golang, multi-player enabled, cpu only, smart tv compatible.
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Preparing for the .NET 10 GC
In .NET 9 we enabled DATAS by default. But .NET 9 is not an LTS release so for many people they will be getting DATAS for the first time…
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How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
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Wild performance tricks
Last week I had the pleasure of attending RustForge in Wellington, New Zealand. I gave a talk titled “Wild performance tricks”. You can watch a recording of my talk . If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, the rest of this post will cover more or less the same material. The talk shows some linker benchmarks, which…
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DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list
Why does Space Station 14 crash with ANGLE on ARM64? 6 hours later…
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Disk Utility still can't check and repair APFS volumes and containers (2021)
Don’t waste time trying to discover which files are still open when you want to check or repair an APFS disk and Disk Utility throws an error. Here’s the solution.
471
Systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
472
Processing Strings 109x Faster Than Nvidia on H100
StringZilla v4 brings CUDA acceleration for string processing: 109x faster than Nvidia's CuDF on edit distances, plus 52-bit MinHash fingerprinting and AES-based hashing.
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I uncovered an ACPI bug in my Dell Inspiron 5567. It was plaguing me for 8 years
Imagine you close your laptop lid to put it to sleep, but instead of pausing, it reboots. Not every time, just often enough to be infuriating. You try to save your work, but the machine decides to start over.
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Hypervisor 101 in Rust
This is a day long course to quickly learn the inner working of hypervisors and techniques to write them for high-performance fuzzing.
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Implicit ODE solvers are not universally more robust than explicit ODE solvers
A very common adage in ODE solvers is that if you run into trouble with an explicit method, usually some explicit Runge-Kutta method like RK4, then you should try an implicit method. Implicit methods, because they are doing more work, solving an implicit system via a Newton method having “better” stability, should be…
476
Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
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RIP pthread_cancel
I posted about adding pthread_cancel use in curl about three weeks ago, we released this in curl 8.16.0 and it blew up right in our faces. Now, with #18540 we are ripping it out again. What happened? short recap pthreads define “Cancelation points”, a list of POSIX functions where a pthread may be cancelled. In…
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Tips for installing Windows 98 in QEMU/UTM
Windows 98 runs surprisingly well in QEMU via UTM SE, but it requires some care in setting it up. It’s a great way to run old 90s Windows and DOS software on your iPad (and Mac too, though you have… Continue reading →
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Removing newlines in FASTA file increases ZSTD compression ratio by 10x
First released with Zstandard 1.3.2 in 2017, the --long range match finder increases the compressor’s search window to at least 128MiB, improving deduplication inside large files. This optional feature had substantial performance overheads at launch, but various optimisations have since brought its performance within…