1441
Imaging a Hard Drive with Non-ECC Memory – What Could Go Wrong?
I recently came home to visit with family, but right now as I write this, it's 1:00am and I'm running memtest86+ by myself in the basement.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
1442
FreeBSD Home Audio Studio
Another guest post by @NeoMoevius from Twitter. Same as earlier with the Native Urban Terror on FreeBSD article. This time it will be about setting up Home Audio Studio on a FreeBSD 13.1 system. Th…
1443
Effortless Performance Improvements in C++: std:unordered_map
This is the second post in the series about effortless performance improvements in C++. Check the first post to get the full story!
1444
ARM vs. Intel on Amazon’s Cloud: A URL Parsing Benchmark
Twitter user opdroid1234 remarked that they are getting more performance out of the ARM nodes than out of the Intel nodes on Amazon's cloud (AWS). I found previously that the Graviton 3 processors had less bandwidth than comparable Intel systems. However, I have not done much in terms of raw compute power. The Intel…
1445
You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
1446
“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
1447
Firecracker internals: Inside the technology powering AWS Lambda (2021)
You are most likely familiar with AWS Lambda and Fargate — Amazon's serverless computing engines. At its nature, serverless computing introduces quite a challenging task requiring both tight security and great performance. For exactly that matter Amazon came up with its microVM solution called Firecracker .
1448
1449
Speedy transactions in multicore in-memory databases
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
1450
Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
1451
Computer Networking Introduction: Ethernet and IP – Heavily Illustrated (2021)
What is a LAN? What is a network segment? How are L1, L2, and L3 segments related? What does it take to send an IP packet from one host to another? What is the difference between LAN, VLAN, and VXLAN?
1452
It's TCP vs. RPC All over Again
We’ve written previously about the fact that the Internet seems to be missing a standard protocol for the request/response paradigm, with repeated attempts to force-fit TCP leading to inevitable mismatches. Sometimes we feel that we are the only people who think this way, with our networking
1453
Is it time to replace TCP in data centers?
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
1454
In Praise of Alpine and APK
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
1455
Dusting off Dreamcast Linux
Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, ...
1456
Queues should be empty
I’ve been writing a pubsub listener for work recently and had this silly “shower thought”: the ideal queue should be empty. Why? If the queue is not empty, it means that whatever job is consuming from the queue is not keeping up with messages coming into it. Ok, then if queues are supposed to be empty, then what are…
1457
AMD ROCm: A Wasted Opportunity
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
1458
I replaced grub with systemd-boot
To be able to investigate and work on the the measured boot features I have switched from grub to systemd-boot (sd-boot).
1459
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control
1460
1461
How to train large models on many GPUs? (2021)
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks”
1462
Service mesh use cases (2020)
Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…
1463
Shells are two things
Command languages and scripting languages are and should be different things.
1464
On the joy of podman and auto-updates (2022)
podman provides an integrated auto-update mechanism, which I recently applied to all of my containers running on feldspaten. The mechanism is nice, but at first appears a bit counter-intuitive. In this post ’m trying to explain how you can use the mechanism and what to watch out for. I’ll start with the trap I think…
1465
1466
How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)
This is a brief mini-howto on how to build a linux based wireless router out of what amounts to spare parts, using the linux router project's single disk router software. The total cost of each end of the router, including antennas and cabling, is less than 1300 US dollars, which is a considerable cost savings over…
1467
1468
QOA, the Quite OK Audio Format
Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless” , “complicated” or “bad” . After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.
1469
1470
I've had bad luck with transparent hugepages on my Linux machines
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…