The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
One day a coworker mentioned that he was thinking about APIs for distributed compute clusters and I jokingly responded “clearly the ideal API would be simply calling telefork() and your process wakes up on every machine of the cluster with the return value being the instance ID”. I ended up captivated by this idea: I…
A blog about computing and other fun.
A common myth about USB keyboards is that they can only support 6-key rollover, and not report more than 6 keys being pressed at a time. In fact, this is wholly untrue; the USB HID device class can support full N-key rollover (NKRO). While keyboards which purport to support USB NKRO are now common, some of them have…
I've been porting the AndroidX collection library to Kotlin multiplatform to experiment with binary compatibility, performance, tooling, and the different memory models. Some of the data structures in the library use array-based binary trees to store elements. The Java code has a lot of shifts to replace power-of-two…
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…
In this blog post I tell my experience mounting a minimalist homelab with a Intel NUC and the ESXi hypervisor.
In a nutshell, NixOS is a operating system based on Linux that provides a declarative package and configuration management.
Ruby's native I/O methods traditionally blocked the calling fiber, leaving event-loop libraries to provide replacement wrappers. This Ruby Concurrency Progress Report presents a lightweight per-thread Fiber Scheduler which lets those native operations cooperate with an event loop. It explains the implementation and…
This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on.The first fe…
6-5-0-who? The 6502 is an iconic processor that dominated home computing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was used in machines ra...
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
The microservices honeymoon period is over. Uber is refactoring thousands of microservices into a more manageable solution [1]; Kelsey Hightower is predicting monoliths are the future [2]; and even Sam Newman is declaring that microservices should never be the default choice, but rather a last resort [3]. What’s going…
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
We have created the seL4 Foundation! But what is the seL4 Foundation, and why did we create it? In a nutshell, these are the reasons (I’ll expand on them below): Provide for the longevity of …
io_uring is a clever new, high-performance interface for asynchronous I/O for Linux without the drawbacks of the aio set of APIs. In this 3-part article series, we look at how to use io_uring to ge…
I have taught operating systems at my university, so I will link my notes from that course here regarding processes.
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
I lift my LAMP beside the github door. Keep ancient Fortran your storied numeric libs cries she. Give me your interpreted, your slow, the wretched refuse of your (insert pun for ‘teeming shore’).
The implementation and history of an iconic Unix feature, with excerpts from the v6 Unix kernel source code, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen
Seeing a program you wrote running directly on the bare metal is deeply satisfying to anyone who enjoys writing software. And it turns out that creating such a program from scratch is easier than it sounds. The hardest part is figuring out where to start. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to write, build and run the…
