931
SSH as a Sudo Replacement
A major caveat in tools like sudo and doas for that matter is that they rely on setuid binaries and privilege escalation in order to run commands as root.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
932
Formal methods: Just good engineering practice?
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
933
A buffer overflow in the XNU kernel
XNU kernel buffer overflow, introduced in macOS 14.0 and fixed in macOS 14.5.
934
Lessons Learned from Scaling to Multi-Terabyte Datasets
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of the…
935
Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
936
IPC in Rust – A Ping Pong Comparison
I wanted to explore different ways of communicating between different processes executing on the same machine, and doing so as fast as possible. We're focussing on high speed inter-process communication (IPC), but some of these approaches can be extended across a network. We'll do this exploration in Rust.
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938
FPGA-Based Disk Controller for the Apple II (2017)
Apple II disk controller cards are weird, there are a crazy number of different types , and many are rare and expensive. Can an FPGA-based solution save the day for retro collectors? You bet! Nearly all the existing disk controllers connect the same 8-bit bus to the same 19-pin disk interface, so a universal clone is…
939
OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a…
940
Making my first embedded Linux system
End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.
941
Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2011
Laurent Le Brun's blog
942
Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
An analysis of the Croatian classic.
943
SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
944
Finding out where syscalls are called from: Stack traces with strace
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
945
Anti-patterns in event-driven architecture
Event-driven architecture is great, but it can cause a lot of headaches if it is used for the wrong purpose.
946
Compilers are too smart
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
947
948
Alarms in medical equipment
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
949
Inline Assembly Dangers
Resolving PS2SDK Soft Reset Issues
950
Making USB devices – end to end guide to your first gadget
Introduction to implementing USB devices. Minimal overview of hardware and software with an example with STM32 microcontroller. Also contains an index to very detailed guides for more information.
951
Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 10: RTC
I’m going to start this post off with the obligatory list of links to the previous parts in the series if you’re new here and are interested in seeing the full story: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and 9 . This is the tale of how I upgraded my Chumby 8 to run a modern Linux kernel.
952
SPI Flash
SPI Flash reader built from a Teensy or Arduino
953
X is justifiably slow (2022)
I regularly hear or read statements like this: “X is slow but this is to be expected because it needs to do a lot of work”. It can be said about an application or a component in a larger system, and can refer to other resources that aren’t time. I often find these profoundly unhelpful as they depend much more on the…
954
Why is Snapshot Isolation not enough?
Let's talk about why Snapshot Isolation is not enough for a general purpose concurrency control. Snapshot Isolation has been adap...
955
Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
956
DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
One of the many enjoyable things about databases is that they generally try to separate how data is represented internally (say on disk) from how it is used. To the point that it has become the norm to not even store the data on the same hardware that is running the queries.
957
Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
958
Fast Shadow Stacks for Go
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
959
Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
960
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…