331
The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug (2021)
A 20 minute Kafka outage brought down our entire Erlang cluster for hours. How could this happen? Follow this fascinating investigation!
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 582 posts.
332
333
Everything Is Broken: Shipping Rust-Minidump at Mozilla
We've been working on the development of rust-minidump. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are and how we made rust-minidump.
334
Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)
The UNIX fork() system call seems like an elegant way to process tasks in parallel. It creates a copy of the current process, allowing tasks to read the same memory, without needing fine-grained synchronization. Unfortunately, you need to use it extremely carefully in large programs because fork in a multi-threaded…
335
LUMI, Europe’s most powerful supercomputer
LUMI is the first pre-exascale supercomputer of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and is now Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. It will be inaugurated on Monday 13 June 2022 in Kajaani. LUMI offers European researchers a world-class tool for understanding complicated phenomena, such as climate change. LUMI serves as a…
336
Making Code Faster
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
337
The Linux kernel can spawn processes on its own
While investigating the aftermath of a potential security breach, I came across a somewhat "odd" process looking like this:
338
SIMD accelerated sorting in Java – how it works and why it was 3x faster
In this post I explain a little about how to use Java’s Vector APIs, attempt to explain how they turn out fast, and then use them to implement a sorting algorithm 3x faster than Arrays.sort . I then explain some problems I found, and how I resolved them. Supporting code is published here .
339
Cranelift, Part 4: A New Register Allocator
This post is the fourth part of a three-part series 1 describing work that I have been doing to improve the Cranelift compiler. In this post, I'll describe the work that went into regalloc2 , a new register allocator I developed over the past year. The allocator started as an effort to port IonMonkey's register…
340
The collapse of complex software
In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great…
341
More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web (2021)
When I started thinking about writing a post about web font loading my intention was to propose relatively sophisticated ideas that I've...
342
343
OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport
OpenBSD's share/misc/airport file and a day trip to Lublin
344
Is there a maximum size for Windows clipboard data?
There is no pre-set maximum size, but that null might be coming from somewhere else.
345
Deploying Transformers on the Apple Neural Engine
An increasing number of the machine learning (ML) models we build at Apple each year are either partly or fully adopting the Transformer…
346
What FreeBSD can offer compared to other operating systems (2020)
I really wanted to make this article short … but I failed miserably. At least I tried to organize it well so one may get back to it after ‘some’ reading because its not a short le…
347
Quick Look at Rosetta on Linux
Yesterday, Apple did release RosettaLinux as part of the macOS Ventura preview. Let’s take a first quick look…
348
Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox . The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern…
349
The true cost of linked lists
Linked lists are often overused in introductory algorithmics courses, due to a heavy focus on theorical complexities. Unfortunatly, in practice, computers are complex beasts. They don’t execute instructions sequentially 1 with the same cost 2 . This means that a data structure with faster theorical complexities does…
350
Hardware-accelerated Linux virtual machines on jailbroken iPhone 12 / iOS 14.1
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
351
Tcpls: Modern Transport Services with TCP and TLS
Guest Post: TCPLS takes advantage of decades of performance optimizations made to TCP and has also a few other tricks up its sleeves.
352
Fallacies of distributed systems
Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
353
Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort
We're sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort
354
355
Using the mold linker for fun and 3x-8x link time speedups
A large C++ codebase meets a new linker: The good, the bad and the performance improvements <a class="more-link" href="https://www.productive-cpp.com/using-the-mold-linker-for-fun-and-3x-8x-link-time-speedups/">... Read More</a>
356
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
357
XMODEM in 2022
Let's start at the beginning: it all started with me trying to boot a system which receives its initial ramdisk over XMODEM.
358
Lunatic brings Erlang's principles to WebAssembly
In this month’s episode of the Functional Futures podcast, our guest is Bernard Kolobara – the creator of Lunatic, an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly. Listen to the episode to find out how Erlang's guiding principles helped Bernard create a runtime that's fast, robust, and scalable.
359
So long, home T1 line; hello, hacking the T1 router
Floodgap has had a T1 line since I moved into this house in 2011. I'm one of those weirdos who runs my own hardware and prefers to avoid ...
360
A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs
The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…