2401
In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
In Search of 2.11BSD, as released Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BS...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
2402
2403
The Floppy Disk of Floating Point
An essay that bids farewell to x87 – a computing architecture too long for this world.
2404
The most remarkable legacy system I have seen
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a bank sometime back. This could be summarized as an internal AWS lambda equivalent. The offering was complete with full CI, CD, unit te…
2405
Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an…
2406
CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP
In this post I'll provide some of my personal experience and history working with BGP, and introduce a new BGP library, CoreBGP, which can be used to build the next generation of BGP-enabled applications.
2407
UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
2408
Scaling Linux Services: Before accepting connections
Theo Julienne is a software & infrastructure engineer.
2409
Raspberry Pi 4 PCIe bridge “chip”
After seeing the work done by Thomasz Mloduchowski and Colin Riley with managing to bridge the Raspberry Pi 4's PCI-Express bus to a USB 3.0 port, and then seeing these comments on hack-a-day, I thought I would give it a go too! So, here's a PCIe bridge chip that simply replaces the VL805 USB 3.
2410
Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
2411
Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned
Console is the epitome of Apple’s problem with tools and support for its users, and is exactly what it needs to fix.
2412
Using Zig to provide stack traces on kernel panic on bare metal (2018)
Last week, I reached an exciting milestone in my career as a programmer. For the first time in my life, I ran code directly on hardware , with no Operating System sitting between the bare metal and my code.
2413
How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
2414
Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
2415
Building a high performance JSON parser
JSON is important, damn near everything that we do as programmers or operators involves JSON at some point. JSON decoding is expensive, if your product talks JSON then performance of marshalling data in and out of JSON is important. This is a talk about designing an efficient replacement for encoding/json.Decoder .
2416
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
2417
Examining ARM vs. x86 Memory Models with Rust
With Apple’s recent announcement that they are moving away from Intel X86 CPU’s to their own ARM CPU’s for future laptops and desktops I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the some differences that can affect systems programmers working in Rust.
2418
2419
Big Sur on Unsupported Macs
My macOS Big Sur Patcher allowed countless users of older Macs to enjoy the new design and features of macOS Big Sur.
2420
ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
It's late 2020 and you just got a brand-new Mac with Apple's own ARM processors. Exciting! But what will development be like?
2421
Faster Integer Parsing
Back with a post after 6 years of silence. If you had to parse a microsecond-resolution epoch timestamp as quickly as possible, how would you do it? We’ll take a look at using compiler intrinsics to do it in log(n) time.
2422
2423
2424
2425
Rust concurrency: the archetype of a message-passing bug
Whenever I have a chance, I extol the virtues of message-passing and event-loops in structuring concurrent workflows in Rust. However, in…
2426
Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM
In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker , mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM , a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu . What baffled me was the speed at which the virtual machine would fire up and run the service. The whole process is to be compared…
2427
Gocker: Docker implemented in 1.3k lines of Go
They are popular and they are misunderstood. Containers have become the default way applications are packaged and run on servers, initially popularized by Docker. Now, Docker itself is misunderstoo…
2428
How x86_64 Addresses Memory
Update 2025-03-05 : @jxu has shared a collection of simplified examples that are even easier to follow than the original ones in this post.
2429
The rise of embarrassingly parallel serverless compute
How distributed serverless compute changes the game on whats possible
2430
Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.