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Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU
I booted the arm64e kernel of macOS 11.0.1 beta 1 kernel in QEMU up to launchd. It’s completely useless, but may be interesting if you’re wondering how an Apple Silicon Mac will boot.
Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users (2019)
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
Analyzing the Limits of Connection Scalability in Postgres
Why it’s important to improve Postgres connection scalability, plus an analysis on the limits of connection scalability today.
OpenBSD Router Guide
NOTE: Currently this guide only deals with IPv4 as most people still don't use IPv6 and many ISPs also still only use IPv4, but IPv6 is planned for a future update of the guide.
A Linux sysadmin's introduction to cgroups
So you've heard of this thing called cgroups, and you are interested in finding out more. Perhaps you caught mention of it while listening to a talk abou...
Two Workers Are Quadratically Better Than One
For latency, anyway. A common architecture pattern is the “task queue”: tasks enter an ordered queue, workers pop tasks and process them. This pattern is used everywhere from distributed systems to thread pools. It applies just as well to human systems, like waiting in line at a supermarket or a bank. Task queues are…
Amazon Launches New RabbitMQ Message Broker Service
In 2017, we launched Amazon MQ – a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker that is fast and feature-rich. It offers queues and topics, durable and non-durable subscriptions, push-based and poll-based messaging, and filtering. With Amazon MQ, we have enhanced lots of new…
Notes on Paxos
These are my notes after learning the Paxos algorithm. The primary goal here is to sharpen my own understanding of the algorithm, but maybe someone will find this explanation of Paxos useful! This post assumes fluency with mathematical notation.
Scipio: A Thread-per-Core Crate for Rust and Linux
Glommio (pronounced glom-io or |glomjəʊ|) is a cooperative thread-per-core crate for Rust & Linux based on io_uring. It allows you to write asynchronous code that takes advantage of rust async/await, but it doesn’t use helper threads anywhere.
Keeping Netflix Reliable Using Prioritized Load Shedding
How viewers are able to watch their favorite show on Netflix while the infrastructure self-recovers from a system failure
Moving BBC Online to the Cloud
The story of how the BBC website has been completely rebuilt and moved from datacentres to the cloud.
Raspberry Pi 400 teardown and review
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…
File Descriptor Transfer over Unix Domain Sockets
Yesterday, I read a phenomenal paper on how disruption free release at Facebook.
Microservices – architecture nihilism in minimalism's clothes
Some recent backtracking from what we have been calling "Microservices" has sparked anew the debate around that software architecture pattern. It turns out that for increasingly more software people, …
Using TLA+ in the Real World to Understand a Glibc Bug
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
macOS 11 boot volume layout
A complete guide to the structure and layout of APFS startup disks from High Sierra to Big Sur (Intel), together with tear-out PDF charts.
The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
Today, SiFive introduces the new HiFive platform for professional RISC-V developers, the HiFive Unmatched! The HiFive Unmatched enables developers to create the RISC-V-based software they need for RISC-V platforms. From real-time operating systems to custom Linux distributions, and the compilers, libraries, and…
What's in a Linux Executable?
Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed somet...
Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8
Microsoft has announced that it is ending the ability to cross-sign drivers, effective 1 July 2021. This will effectively make it impossible to release new or updated drivers for Windows 7, Windows…
On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
Grafana Tempo, a scalable distributed tracing system
Tempo is designed to be a robust trace id lookup store whose only dependency is object storage (GCS/S3).
Fedora 33
Today, I’m excited to share the results of the hard work of thousands of contributors to the Fedora Project: our latest release, Fedora 33, is here! This is a big release with a lot of change, but I believe all that work will also make it a comfortable one, fulfilling our goal of bringing you […]
How you could have come up with Paxos yourself
In the field of computer science, the Paxos algorithm is notorious for how difficult it is to understand. I had to learn the Paxos algorithm in my distributed systems class. I even have "implemented" it by translating Leslie Lamport's TLA+ to Python. But I didn't understand it until much much later.