3301
FreeBSD 2020 Q4 Status Report
This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
3302
Escaping VirtualBox 6.1: Part 1
This post is about a VirtualBox escape for the latest currently available version (VirtualBox 6.1.16 on Windows). The vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited by our team Sauercl0ud as part of the RealWorld CTF 2020/2021. The vulnerability was known to the organizers, requires the guest to be able to insert…
3303
3304
Huawei ExaGear: x86_64 apps on Arm 64-bit Linux systems
Note: This post is only kept up for historical reasons. The current ExaGear EULA doesn’t allow using ExaGear outside of Huawei Kunpeng processors.
3305
XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.
3306
3307
3308
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
GNOME filepicker and my toilets are broken because of culture of mediocrity.
3309
The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud
That standard image that explains the difference between on-premises, IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS in the cloud? You know what, it is hugely misleading. Here is the real deal.
3310
Why mmap is faster than system calls (2019)
When I ask my colleagues why mmap is faster than system calls, the answer is inevitably “system call overhead”: the cost of crossing the…
3311
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
3312
Reed-Solomon error recovery in RAID-6
A post describing a simple example how you can create your own manual error recovery solution based on what is used in RAID-6, in Python.
3313
3314
Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks. Furthermore, the cost model can be extended to count "nearby" memory accesses as free. That is…
3315
3316
Understanding Connections and Pools
What connections are, how they affect our systems, and how and why pooling works.
3317
Load testing is hard and the tools are not great
If you're building an application that needs to scale—and we all tell ourselves that we are—then at some point you have to figure out if it does or not. This is where load testing comes in: if you want to see whether or not your application can handle scale, just generate scale and see if it can handle it! It sounds…
3318
3319
2021 GPS Accuracy Issue Impacting Some Garmin, Suunto, other GPS Devices
Update: As of Sunday morn...
3320
3321
3322
Against Essential and Accidental Complexity
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
3323
3324
Systems design explains the world: volume 1
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...
3325
The Genius of RISC-V Microprocessors
How the instruction set for RISC-V processors has been designed cleverly for both simplicity and high performance.
3326
Some Git internals
Here is my test file tree. There are two files and a "src" subdirectory, where another two files are stored:
3327
3328
Redox OS 0.6.0
The Redox official website
3329
Jepsen: Scylla 4.2-rc3
Scylla is a distributed wide-column 1 database which originated as a C++ port of Cassandra, aiming for improved performance. It supports both Cassandra- and DynamoDB -compatible APIs, and is intended for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, including analytics, messaging, and other time-series data.
3330
Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.