361
Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD
Discover the strengths of FreeBSD in this article. Learn about its advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features that set it apart.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 553 posts.
362
363
SeL4 on RISC-V Verified to Binary Code
… and seL4 and RISC-V Foundations form an alliance In June 2020 we announced that the seL4 microkernel, the world’s first operating system (OS) kernel with a machine-checked proof of implemen…
364
Just Say No to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering (2016)
Jialin Li, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, and Dan R. K. Ports, University of Washington
365
Branchless Coding in Go
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
366
An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
367
The Unix Magic Poster
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
368
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part IV
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU , the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run…
369
The compiler will optimize that away
A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…
370
Query Engines: Push vs. Pull
People talk a lot about “pull” vs. “push” based query engines, and it’s pretty obvious what that means colloquially, but some of the details can be a bit hard to figure out.
371
372
373
Implicit In-order Forests: Zooming a billion trace events at 60fps
In the course of trying to figure out how to smoothly zoom timelines of a billion trace events, I figured out a cool tree structure that I can’t find elsewhere online, which it turned out two of my friends have independently derived after not finding anything on their own searches. It’s a way of implementing an index…
374
375
Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math…
376
377
Diving Deep on S3 Consistency
A deep dive on why we changed Amazon S3's consistency model
378
Leaving No Pixel Behind: Three Years in Xenia's GPU Emulation
xenia is a BSD licensed open source research project for emulating Xbox 360 games on modern PCs.
379
Fedora Linux 34 is officially here
Fedora Linux 34 is released and ready for you to install or upgrade today.
380
QEMU Internals
A series of posts about QEMU internals:
381
2021 Williams F1 Computational Fluid Dynamics
Thanks to some clever people I was able to get a CAD model of the current 2021 Williams F1 car — that’s not something that happens every day, so of course I had to run CFD on it. CAD Ge…
382
Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/S: How I Learned to Love Tail Calls in C
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
383
How Facebook encodes videos
People upload hundreds of millions of videos to Facebook every day. Making sure every video is delivered at the best quality — with the highest resolution and as little buffering as possible — mean…
384
Common interface for Linux NIC statistics
In Linux 5.13 ethtool gains an interface for querying IEEE and IETF statistics. This removes the need to parse vendor specific strings in...
385
Digging for performance gold: finding hidden performance wins
We are fortunate that so many people choose Chrome as their browser to get things done, which is why we are continually investing in making ...
386
Tiny Container Challenge: Building a 6kB Containerized HTTP Server
TL;DR I set out to build the smallest container image that I could that was still able to do something useful. By taking advantage of multistage builds, the scratch base image, and a tiny assembly-based HTTP server, I was able to get it down to 6.32kB!
387
Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux
A year ago at BUILD 2020 we introduced our goal to bring Linux GUI applications to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Linux GUI applications. We
388
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and this post (EvE) as a crash course on how BGP works).
389
Porting Doom to the Fastly edge serverless platform
id Software’s DOOM has become one of the most-ported games in history. It felt like a perfect project to port to Compute, built on our serverless compute environment, to experiment with different applications of the product.
390
Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
Erik Bernhardsson