2761
What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful
Addendum: I've added a few additional tips for conference papers chairs, papers committee members, and papers sorters .
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
2762
Rethinking Files
In Unix, everything is a file. This is often viewed as a positive, but it's often a poor abstraction for many things. This discussion goes into some of the issues.
2763
Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi
Join me as I test-drive the smallest ever Kubernetes distribution k3s. Find out how this runs on Raspberry Pi compared to kubeadm with Docker.
2764
Why Ice Lake is Important – a bit-basher’s perspective
With Computex, there’s been a ton of news about Ice Lake (hereafter ICL) and the Sunny Cove core (SNC). Wikichip, Extremetech and Anandtech among many others have coverage (and there will be …
2765
What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?
Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, 'What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?' I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions. They also apply, to some extent,
2766
An x86 Assembler in 256 LOC (2017)
For the first “real” post in this blog, we’ll build an x86 assembler in less than 256 lines of C code. Obviously, it won’t implement every x86 instruction, but it will implement a surprisingly useful subset: data movement, control flow, integer arithmetic, bitwise operations, and function calls. We won’t be able to…
2767
Ways to break your systems code using volatile (2010)
Regarding the example #5, I must be confused about the definition of a sequence point because the resulting assembly output seems to be non-ANSI C:
2768
2769
Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
2770
2771
Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018)
I’ve gone through many iterations of a Home NAS over the years. It started with an AMD Phenom based system running in a Norco case with about 8 hard SATA hard drives (4 primary, 4 backup via Rsync). The noise and power consumption of that system was overkill for what it was used for, so I sold it and went to a…
2772
2773
A Tale of Query Optimization
Last December, I got an interesting bug report from the VWO support team. It seemed like the loading time of a particular analytics report was ridiculously slow for a big Enterprise customer. Since I am part of the Data platform, a flag was immediately raised and I got involved in debugging the issue.
2774
Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
2775
FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
2776
Zero Cost Abstractions
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
2777
ELF files on Linux
An step-by-step introduction into ELF files. Learn the structure and format, to understand how binaries and libraries on Linux systems work.
2778
Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
It's not quite the number of seconds since 1 January 1970.
2779
Mac: Keyboard Shortcuts Killed by Bug
Want to use App Shortcuts in Mojave? You’re out of luck because its broken, and Apple can’t be bothered to fix it.
2780
2781
2782
The speed of BGP network propagation
At the end of March 2019 I did a talk at the INEX’s (Ireland’s biggest internet exchange point) Annual General Meeting. I was supposed to record it, however in a brief panic due to HDMI not working on my laptop I forgot to start a recording of it. Since people found it interesting I figured I would turn it into a blog…
2783
Distributed consensus revised
Distributed consensus revised Howard, PhD thesis Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! To kick things off, I’m going to start by taking a look at Dr Howard’s PhD thesis, ‘Distributed con…
2784
How to Understand Systems
Solving problems by identifying underlying systems
2785
2786
On lists, cache, algorithms, and microarchitecture
Lists are rather hardware-unfriendly data structure. However, having a closer look at why is that and what can be done to improve this can provide an interesting insight into how high-level algorithms performance is affected by the processor microarchitecture.
2787
An Introduction to Vectorization
Your CPU has a 32-bit addition instruction that computes the sum of two 32-bit integers x and y, producing a 32-bit result. (The 33rd bit of the sum, the "carry bit", is usually thrown away.)
2788
2789
Anatomy of an ELF executable
Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…
2790
Stop Memsetting Structures
TL;DR: Use C99’s designated initializers instead. Because it’s 2019! Edit: This post was discussed on Hacker News, Lobste.rs and /r/c_programming. It has been updated to address some of the concerns raised by commenters. One of the little things that annoy me when reading code is the unnecessary use of memset() to…