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Is Catalina a Good Upgrade Yet?
Although 10.15.3 fixes a serious bug in Mail and Catalina is steadily maturing, there are many users who still shouldn’t upgrade.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
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Writing a RISC-V OS in Rust: System Calls
System calls are a way for unprivileged, user applications to request services from the kernel. In the RISC-V architecture, we invoke the call using the ecall instruction. This will cause the CPU to halt what it's doing, elevate privilege modes, and then jump to whatever function handler is stored in the mtvec…
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Libc++'s Implementation of std::string
I. Introduction
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Jepsen: Etcd 3.4.3
The etcd key-value store is a distributed system intended for use as a coordination primitive. Like Zookeeper and Consul , etcd stores a small volume of infrequently-updated state ( by default, up to 8 GB ) in a key-value map, and offers strict-serializable reads, writes and micro-transactions across the entire…
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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Why ZFS is not good at growing and reshaping pools, or shrinking 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…
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Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming
Probability problems come up a lot in systems programming, and I’m using that term loosely to mean everything from operating systems programming and networking, to building large online services, to creating virtual worlds like in games. Here’s a bunch of rough-and-ready probability rules of thumb that are deeply…
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Postmortem of the failure of one hosting storage unit on Jan. 8, 2020
On January 8, 2020 at 14:51 UTC, one of our storage units used for our hosting services hosted at LU-BI1 went down.
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Distri: 20x faster initramfs (initrd) from scratch
In case you are not yet familiar with why an initramfs (or initrd, or initial ramdisk) is typically used when starting Linux, let me quote the wikipedia definition: “[…] initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process […] to make…
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SQLite Is Serverless
Most SQL database engines are implemented as a separate server process. Programs that want to access the database communicate with the server using some kind of interprocess communication (typically TCP/IP) to send requests to the server and to receive back results. SQLite does not work this way. With SQLite, the…
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Ambitions for a Unix Shell
As discussed in the January blog roadmap , I want to concretely describe a reduced Oil language , and see if we can get it "done" in 2020.
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NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
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The Hunt for the Fastest Zero
Unexpected performance deviations depending on how you spell zero.
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FreeBSD is an amazing operating system
This is a small article about some of my adventures with FreeBSD and why I believe it is an amazing operating system.
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I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
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Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
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Exploiting the Windows Cryptoapi Vulnerability
On Tuesday, the NSA announced they had found a critical vulnerability in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019. This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing. Concerned? Get the important details…
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Ways of Implementing a System Call
Today, we’re going to look at the many ways of implementing user-to-kernel transitions on x86, i.e. system calls. Let’s first quickly review what system calls actually need to accomplish.
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Everything I Know About SSDs
March 2019: Introduction: I started writing this rather long page for my own benefit, when I acquired a upgrade from my old 2006 Win 8 250 gb HDD PC to a Dell Optiflex 3010 with a 128 gb SSD. I never used more than 30 or 40 gb of the system drive, and I'm not a gamer or an avid film or music collector either. Not on a…
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My C code works with -O3 but not with -O0
v1.2 - added comments from HN v1.3 - added “What does fits mean ?” v1.4 - added the conclusion When something very basic goes wrong, I have this hierarchy of potential culprits: the compiler buggy hardware OS vendor last and least me, because I don’t make mistakes :) So what...
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Writing Software to Last 50 Years
Design principles for writing software meant to survive decades of changing requirements and technology.
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1195725856 and other mysterious numbers
Last week was the final week for this half's performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last h...
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Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
There is a new release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? . This release features a number of formatting and build-system improvements by the indefatigible Akira Yokosawa. On the formatting side, we have listings automatically generated from source code, clever…
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What I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant (2019)
Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voices which say FreeBSD is dead, Linux is the way to go. Most of the time those voices are trolls, or people which do not really know what FreeBSD has to offer. Sometimes those voices wear blinders, they only see their
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Remote iPhone exploitation part 2: a remote ASLR bypass
Posted by Samuel Groß, Project ZeroThis post is the second in a series about a remote, interactio...
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Copying data is wasteful, mutating data is dangerous
Copying data wastes memory, and modifying/mutating data can lead to bugs. Learn how to implement a compromise between the two in Python: hidden mutability.