1951
macOS has become more reliable
How APFS, the boot volume group, hashes, and Secure Boot all combine to guarantee the integrity of your system, and save you trouble and work.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
1952
Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
The papers over the next few weeks will be from (or related to) research from VLDB 2021 - on the horizon is one of my favorite systems conferences SOSP . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you…
1953
Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust
Updated: 2023-01-06 About a year ago I was bitten by the PL bug. It started with reading Crafting Interpreters and discovering the wonders hidden under the hood of a compiler. I am also been a big fan of Emacs, and this started to get me interested in how its interpreter works. At the same time, I was reading the Rust…
1954
Software Architecture Patterns: 5 minute read
Main software architecture patterns in a nutshell.
1955
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1957
Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
[German]Brief information, which is already here with me since August 2021, but which I have not yet addressed in the blog. David Xanatos has pointed out to me that Microsoft is refusing to sign…
1958
Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot – Less Than 2 Seconds
This post tells about my journey on fast-booting a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPI). In addition to that, some optimizations are discussed that can be applied to a Qt (QML) application. At the end, we will have a …
1959
There is no 'printf'
In C, 'main' returns an int. What happens when you don't explicitly return a value, though? C99 provides a return value of 0, but C89... well, that's undefined, my favorite kind of behavior.
1960
Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
This blog post describes the optimizations enabled by -ffast-math when compiling C or C++ code with GCC 11 for x86_64 Linux (other languages/operating systems/CPU architectures may enable slightly different optimizations).
1961
1962
How to Safely Think in Systems
While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…
1963
Mezzano on Librebooted ThinkPads
I decided to try running Mezzano on real hardware. I figured my Librebooted ThinkPads would be good targets, since, thanks to Coreboot and the Linux kernel, I have reference source code for all the hardware.
1964
Speed Matters
I think that one of the most important things to focus on improving is how fast you can work.
1965
FreeBSD Audio
I started using FreeBSD in 2016 as a dual-boot with Linux. The reason was that at the time Linux provided no support for real-time threads and preemptive scheduling but did provide a wider choice of audio applications. Today, as the FreeBSD audio ecosystem improved a lot, I am a happy single-OS user. You may ask…
1966
How does apt render its fancy progress bar?
Python Developer and Trainer
1967
Tiny ELF Files: Revisited in 2021
Quick edit: While I work on a proper update, I'll note here that several posters on reddit and hackernews have pointed out ways to bring the total size of the program down to 105 bytes while still printing the full "Hello, world!" Much credit goes to Josh Triplett , who produced the 105-byte version which you can find…
1968
Getting to the bottom of web map performance
mostly 1990s PC gaming
1969
AWS Lambda Cold Start Times
Let’s compare the performance of all supported runtimes + 2 custom runtimes (Rust and GraalVM).
1970
Effective Concurrency with Algebraic Effects in Multicore OCaml
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
1971
When can glibc be built with Clang?
Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…
1972
So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here , here , and here ), at the Kangrejos Rust for Linux Workshop ( here , here , and here ) and 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit . At least…
1973
V7 Unix had no stack size limit, and when Unix acquired one
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…
1974
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1976
Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
1977
FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
1978
“Static Linking Considered Harmful” Considered Harmful
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
1979
Tools to measure software energy consumption from your computer
Measuring the energy consumption of software is far from being a trivial task. This article provides essential details about energy consumption tools, their...
1980
Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks (2019)
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.