1771
In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
1772
Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
1773
Debian and firmware
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
1774
Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs. NixOS
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
1775
Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
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…
1776
M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
1777
The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
1778
Rewriting Sysctl(8) in Rust: Systeroid
sysctl is a simple and great tool for modifying the kernel parameters. It does its job very well by providing an easy-to-use interface for /proc/sys. It is maintained as a part of procps toolkit for years and it can easily be considered a legacy tool today. So why not push it to its limits and turn it into a more…
1779
I hope distributed is not the new default
I miss people. :-(
1780
Inside the longest Atlassian outage
Hundreds of companies have no access to JIRA, Confluence and Atlassian Cloud. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage?
1781
File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink
Fun with LapLink 5 and parallel port file transfers under FreeDOS
1782
Sorry, Wrong Number: Debugging a Crash Under Wine
A blog about software.
1783
A System-Witch’s Package Manager Murder Mystery
It was a calm day on the puppy-linux thinkpad. The CPU was cool, the RAM was operating at double data rate, and a gentle breeze flowed through the chassis as the fan whirred away. A girl wanted to log onto Discord to chat with her friends, but much to her dismay, Discord needed a package update! No matter, such things…
1784
1785
Using Windows after 15 years on Linux
I've been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it's been going.
1786
Hand-optimizing the TCC code generator
I am on a number of different compiler mailing lists. One of those is the mailing list for the Tiny C Compiler . Imagine my surprise when a recent email mentioned our latest series and suggested trying a similar approach to improve the code generator in TCC. I was interested to see if there were any low-hanging fruit…
1787
The Tower of Weakenings: Memory Models for Everyone
In my previous article I looked at the ways that Rust could be better at pointers. Half of the problems were fundamental issues that affect basically every programming language that lets you mess with pointers directly, and the other half were rust-specific issues. My article also proposed two solutions: for the…
1788
The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
1789
What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?
Is a process named triald stealing lots of CPU? Or maybe ~/Library/Trial is huge, or filling your backups? Maybe it’s all just one of Apple’s Experiments.
1790
Your computer is a distributed system
Many have observed that today's computers are distributed systems implementing the abstraction of the shared-memory multiprocessor. The wording in the title is from the 2009 paper " Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? ". Some points from that and other sources:
1791
Converting integers to decimal strings faster with AVX-512
In most systems, integers are stored using a fixed binary representation. It is common to store integers using 32-bit or 64-bit words. You sometimes need to convert it to a string. For example, the integer 12345 might need to be converted to the five characters '12345'. In an earlier blog post, I presented the simpler…
1792
Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
1793
Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon
The transition to Apple Silicon brought about many exciting things, but one of the capabilities left behind was access to the world of Intel-based virtual machines. X86_64 just isn't a trivial architecture to emulate, and it may never be feasible to do so on Apple Silicon at a useful speed as the operating systems you…
1794
Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
1795
1796
AWS Graviton vs. M1 vs. M1 Pro Node.js Benchmarks
I am lucky in that I have a few side projects which have grown up to become full fledged companies. One of them builds little tools to detect different types of financial crime.
1797
Problems with “graceful shutdown” in Kubernetes (2019)
Grace is overrated
1798
Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
1799
1800
Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...