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How Does an Intel Processor Boot?
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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Why you can have millions of goroutines but only thousands of Java threads
Many seasoned engineers working in JVM based languages have seen errors like this: [error] (run-main-0) java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create native thread: [error] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create native thread: [error] at java.base/java.lang.Thread.start0(Native Method) [error] at…
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Lolbench: automagically and empirically discovering Rust performance regressions
ramblings by Adam Perry
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How I ended up writing opensnoop in pure C using eBPF
opensnoop in pure C using eBPF
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems
The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012 I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked…
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Linux – The beginning of the end?
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
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Dmesg under the hood
Dmesg allows us to grasp what's going on under the hood when the kernel gets bad. Check out how dmesg is able to read kernel logs and show to the user.
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From VNC to reverse shell
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
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Idle Until Urgent
A few weeks ago I was looking at some of the performance metrics for my site. Specifically, I wanted to see how I was doing on our newest metric, first input delay (FID). My site is just a blog (and doesn’t run much JavaScript), so I expected to see pretty good results.
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Pause/unpause any X11 application
Many desktop oriented operating systems try to provide various usability improvements and features, like quite useful Expose or Dashboard in Mac OS X or useless Tiles concept in recent editions of …
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x86 finds its way into the iPhone
Personal page where to dump sparse knowledge
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Remote Code Execution in Alpine Linux
tl;dr I found several bugs in apk, the default package manager for Alpine Linux. Alpine is a really lightweight distro that is very commonly used with Docker...
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Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms
You might have read that Mozilla recently switched Windows builds to clang-cl . More recently, those Windows builds have seen both PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) and LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled .
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Serverless: Cold Start War
Comparison of cold start statistics for FaaS across AWS, Azure and GCP
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What Is Systems Programming, Really?
I have a gripe with the phrase
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AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
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When optimising code, never guess, always measure
This page has been Tagged As Software This is a truism that lots of people quote, but it can be hard to remember, especially in the heat of battle (as it were). Rather fortunately it came to mind just when needed, as I found something completely unexpected.
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How the Go runtime implements maps efficiently without generics
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
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Measuring context switching and memory overheads for Linux threads
In this post I want to explore the costs of threads on modern Linux machines, both in terms of time and space. The background context is designing high-load concurrent servers, where using threads is one of the common schemes .
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The Performance Cost of CORS Requests on Single-Page Applications
The title may lead you to think that this post is another ranting post about the downside of a “Single Page Application”. It is more about…
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A little bit of the one-time MacOS version still lingers in ZFS
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…
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How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (1999)
As a rule, "sophisticated" progrmming is pretty boring - optimizing the unnecessary to speed up the uninteresting. Here, however, is an incredibly sophisticated package intended for fun and games. The more you know about software, the more astounded you will become as you read this.
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two
In my last post I promised to give more details about some rabbit holes that I went down during the investigation, including page tables, locks, WMI, and a vmmap bug. Those details are here, along …