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PythonBPF – Writing eBPF Programs in Pure Python
I brag about my newest obsession.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Hypervisor in 1k Lines
Write your first hypervisor from scratch, in 1K LoC.
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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
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Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance
In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately swap to a different allocator in a musl environment.
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Kernel-hack-drill and exploiting CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel
Some memory corruption bugs are much harder to exploit than others. They can involve race conditions, crash the system, and impose limitations that make a researcher's life difficult. Working with such fragile vulnerabilities demands significant time and effort. CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel is one such hard bug…
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Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips
If there is one thing the Unreal Engine doesn’t suffer from, it is it’s lack of features. Over the past years it has been transformed from “just” a game engine into an ̵…
488
%CPU utilization is a lie
I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest tells you how close…
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Indices, not Pointers
There is a pattern I’ve learned while using Zig which I’ve never seen used in any other language. It’s an extremely simple trick which - when applied to a data structure - reduces memory usage, reduces memory allocations, speeds up accesses, makes freeing instantaneous, and generally makes everything much, much…
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Installing UEFI Firmware on ARM SBCs
I'm going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images on a ROCK 5 ITX+.
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How is Ultrassembler so fast?
Ultrassembler is a superfast and complete RISC-V assembler library that I'm writing as a component of the bigger Chata signal processing project.
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Writing a Hypervisor in 1k Lines
Writing a Hypervisor in 1,000 Lines
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How to slow down a program and why it can be useful
Making programs slower can be useful to find...
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Thrashing
I’ve invested in a new odometer to help my car go faster. Accountability is important, and as a driver I believe the most important thing I can do is set measurable, achievable and inspiring goals for the people pushing my car down the road.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.
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Windows 7 x64 Extended Support Page
Windows 7 ESU extended support for all Windows 7 users out there!
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The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…
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The MiniPC Revolution
Reasons why you should consider breaking your hardware up into MiniPCs.
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How to check if your Apple Silicon Mac is booting securely
How to check your Mac is booting in Full Security, and how to read its log to verify all the key steps involved in that process.
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SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings
SQLite doesn’t do fsync unless specified.
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In-Memory Filesystems in Rust
I’ve been working on a CLI tool recently, and one of the things it does is manage files on disk. I have written a lot of file management tests for Bundler, and the two biggest reasons that the Bundler test suite is slow are exec and fstat. Knowing that, I thought I would try to get out ahead of the slow file stat…
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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
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How to make things slower so they go faster
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
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Why was Apache Kafka created?
The story behind how LinkedIn created Apache Kafka
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Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
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Acronis True Image costs performance when not used
Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what har…
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Without the futex, it's futile
Review: It's a history text, not a CS text
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Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386
I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/outpu...
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Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs
The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…