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Distributed Consensus – How Shared Data Is Stored
If you don’t work in computers, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how data gets stored on computers or in the cloud. I’m…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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The largest Git repo
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
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Postgres performance analysis resulted in a 10x improvement in CPU use
Heap is the only digital insights platform that shows everything users do on your site, revealing the "unknown unknowns" that stay invisible with other tools. Learn about how we improved our performance and saved millions!
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Mono 5.0 Ships with Concurrent Garbage Collector
In Mono 5.0 we are shipping a new operation mode for our Garbage Collector: Concurrent Garbage Collection.
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Adding a new Bytecode instruction to the .NET runtime
Now that the CoreCLR is open-source we can do fun things, for instance find out if it’s possible to add new IL (Intermediate Language) instruction to the runtime.
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Further hardening glibc malloc() against single byte overflows
Introduction Back in 2014, while at Project Zero, I exploited a buffer overflow of a single NUL byte in glibc . Tavis Ormandy had found th...
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Reverse-Engineering the Intel Management Engine
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Treble: A modular base for Android
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
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New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store
We're REALLY excited about this announcement and think many of you will be too ;) On May 11th 2017, during Microsoft's Build conference keynote, Terry
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Exploiting the Linux kernel via packet sockets
Guest blog post, posted by Andrey KonovalovIntroductionLately I’ve been spending some time ...
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The evolution of Unix architecture in two diagrams
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
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Lost Generation: The Relay Computers
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
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Quantum Up Close: What is a browser engine?
A web browser is a piece of software that loads remote files and displays them locally, allowing for user interaction. Quantum is the code name for an project we’ve undertaken ...
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The Configuration Complexity Clock
When I was a young coder, just starting out in the big scary world of enterprise software, an older, far more experienced chap gave me a ste...
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BBR, the new kid on the TCP block
A look at Google's delay-controlled TCP flow control algorithm, called BBR.
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Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…
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Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD
I've been chipping away at bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but you know, life got in the ...
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I Broke Rust's Package Manager for Windows Users
Last weekend I was playing around with a way to represent null-terminated UTF8 strings in Rust. Rather than just toying with it forever, I decided ...
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Rediscovering the Intel AMT Vulnerability
On May 1, 2017 Intel disclosed the AMT vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00075), but details of that vulnerability were not made public. However, Tenable researchers were able to overcome this challenge and make Tenable the first to deliver Intel AMT vulnerability detection capabilities to customers, just minutes after Intel’s…
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Truly Seamless Reloads with HAProxy
What users often call a “seamless” or “hitless” reload is a configuration update or a service upgrade performed with no impact on user experience.