The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 555 posts.
Introduced in 2019 (kernel 5.1) by Jens Axboe, io_uring (henceforth uring) is a system for providing the kernel with a schedule of system calls, and receiving the results as they're generated. Whereas epoll and kqueue support multiplexing, where you're told when you can usefully perform a system call using some set of…
A visual introduction to memory allocation.
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
Intel investigated architectural enhancements and modifications for a 64-bit mode-only architecture.
Tycho Andersen
The Nintendo GameBoy is an exceptionally well-documented system, perfect for anybody who’d like to take a crack at emulation. Publicly-maintained resources like the Pan Docs make it both approachable and convenient to get an overview of the GameBoy’s address space layout, to understand the mechanics of hardware…
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
A blog by and for database architects.
Apache Kafka has been the most popular open source event streaming system for many years and it continues to grow in popularity. Within the wider ecosystem there are other open source and source available competitors to Kafka such as Apache Pulsar, NATS Streaming, Redis Streams, RabbitMQ and more re
How we gained 2–3% improvements in compile times by making GHC better at printing code.
I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my expe…
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
This blog post presents several techniques to make the binaries resulting from C or C++ compilation smaller with GCC (or Clang). Please note...
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here's what it shows:
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust…
Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as …
Amazon produces and delivers to customers world-class entertainment via Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios, MGM+, Amazon Music, Audible, Wondery, Amazon Games, and Twitch. Amazon’s entertainment properties empower millions of customers around the world to enjoy a massive selection of the very best in…
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance. Of course, no single measure ……
A high-level overview of Temporal's new .NET runtime, and some interesting challenges encountered during its development.
An investigation of weird hardware utilization highlighting some interesting Linux kernel behaviors.
Apple has just released the first of its new Rapid Security Responses (RSRs) for macOS 13.3.1 Ventura. This is indicated as macOS Rapid Security Response 13.3.1 (a), and is just just over 300 MB to…
By Phil Norman Code at Scale At Google, tens of thousands of software engineers contribute to a multi-billion-line mono-repository . This re...
First: performance is tricky and bechmarking even more so. I will talk some numbers in this post but of course they are what I have measured for my specific tests on my machine. Your numbers for your test cases will be different. Over the last six months or so, curl has undergone a number of … Continue reading curl 8…
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
