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A few thoughts on Fuchsia security
I want to say a few words about my current adventure. I joined the Fuchsia project at its inception and worked on the daunting task of buil...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
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Asynchronous Everything (2015)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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SSH quoting
A while back there was a thread on one of our company mailing lists about SSH quoting, and I posted a long answer to it. Since then a few people have asked me questions that caused me to reach for it, so I thought it might be helpful if I …
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Fitting a FORTH in 512 bytes
Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just…
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Privilege escalation with polkit: How to get root on Linux with a seven-year-ol
polkit is a system service installed by default on many Linux distributions. It’s used by systemd, so any Linux distribution that uses systemd also uses polkit.
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Rqlite 6.0: the evolution of a distributed database design
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. v6.0.0 is out now and makes clustering more robust. It also lays the foundation for more important features. What's new in 6.0? 6.0 multiplexes multiple logical connections between rqlite nodes…
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I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
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Design Issues in LLVM IR
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
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Chrome is faster in M91
Since the launch of Chrome in 2008, speed has been one of the 4 core principles that shape the work we do to deliver a highly performant br...
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FreeBSD from a NetBSD developer’s perspective
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
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How we achieved write speeds of 1.4M rows per second
The detailed story of how to build a vector-based storage model from scratch.
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Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
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How Facebook deals with PCIe faults to keep its data centers running reliably
Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) hardware continues to push the boundaries of computing thanks to advances in transfer speeds, the number of available lanes for simultaneous data de…
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Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery
I got the chance to investigate an interesting bug in SerenityOS this week. It was related to the decoding of JPG images in the operating system. For some reason, when a JPG image is viewed, it comes out like this: Lenna, showing up with incorrect colors. Weird, huh? Also seems like a simple confusion of RGB vs. BGR…
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History of ZFS Part 2: Exploding in Popularity
Discover how ZFS rapidly gained popularity from its inception at Sun, leading to the rise of OpenZFS. Learn about its journey in the second part of our series.
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Leaky Abstractions
In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond…
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Why Prefetch Is Broken
When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it's not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn't have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out…
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The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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The most expensive number in engineering
How to put a price on the limits of knowledge
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A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
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Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
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QUIC is now RFC 9000
QUIC version 1 is officially formalized, and QUIC deployments will now move away from using temporary draft versions to the newly minted version 1.
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V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler
In V8 v9.1 we’re improving V8 performance by 5–15% with Sparkplug: a new, non-optimizing JavaScript compiler.
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Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can
And why you should too!
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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
A whirlwind tour through the bucket-load of fail that is Urbit.
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A journey to io_uring, AIO and modern storage devices
We performed experiments to find out how different Linux system calls perform for available devices.