361
Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 555 posts.
362
Performance excuses debunked
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
363
The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
364
You could have invented futexes
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
365
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM file transfers over SSH using Qodem
366
Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
367
Haiku's (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design and Implementation
A few months after my contract with Haiku, Inc. began, I rewrote the implementation of the Haiku kernel’s condition variables (as opposed to our userspace condition variables, which are from POSIX.) As this new implementation has run in Haiku …
368
I built a special PCIe card to test GPUs on the Pi
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
369
Keep the monolith, but split the workloads
Everybody loves a monolith, but you can hit issues as you scale. Learn how splitting workloads can improve your monolithic architecture's performance and scalability, and understand the trade-offs between monolithic systems and microservices.
370
Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
The Z Garbage Collector (ZGC)—a scalable, low-latency garbage collector providing sub-millisecond max pause times—continues to evolve. This session will review the design goals behind ZGC and provide a look into the impact of the upcoming support for multiple generations. It will also present general guidance on…
371
Libreboot 20230423
Libreboot – Libreboot 20230423 released!
372
Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)
Published: 18-09-2014 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
373
Windows on Btrfs
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
374
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
When the JPEG folks were working on image compression, they didn't create a better or faster LZ. Instead they developed new approaches. I se...
375
The weird world of Windows file paths
File system paths on Windows are stranger than you might think. On any Unix-derived system, a path is an admirably simple thing: if it starts with a /, it’s a path. Not so on Windows, which serves up a bewildering variety of schemes for composing a path.
376
Pico Cray – Small scale distributed computing
The Pico Cray is a cluster of 8 Picos and a controller Pico. All Picos are connected in parallel by an I2C bus. The controller is designated by one GPIO being held low, the processor Pico’s addresses are allocated automatically. The Controller Pico has a 320x240px display connected by SPI and a couple of buttons. ……
377
How RocksDB Works
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
378
Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way
Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
379
Offline is just online with extreme latency
I just finished watching “Local-first Software” by Peter Van Hardenberg and loved it! He talks about changing the paradigm we’re currently in where a program…
380
Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
381
More optimizations in the compiler and JIT
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
382
The Inner Workings of Distributed Databases
Comparison of replication options of time-series databases.
383
Breaking the limits of TLA+ model checking
Graphing TLA+ state spaces for fun and profit.
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Horrible Code, Clean Performance
A short tale of how horrible code yields clean performance.
386
Unwinding the Stack the Hard Way
Tutorial on how to make a stack trace or backtrace manually unwinding the stack using ELF’s .eh_frame and call frame information (CFI)
387
OpenVMS 9.2 for x86: Auto boot, licenses, PAKs, networking and SSH
Published: 15-04-2023 22:30 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
388
Batch computing and the coming age of AI systems
There’s a lot of excitement right now about human-in-the-loop systems supercharged by foundation models including chat assistants ( ChatGPT ), word processing ( Microsoft Office ), graphic design ( Stable Diffusion ), and code editing ( Copilot ). However, these systems only begin to scratch the surface of the role…
389
Load Balancing
A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.
390
Efficiency trades off against resiliency
What’s the “right” level of CPU utilization for a server? If you look at a monitoring dashboard from a well-designed and well-run service, what CPU utilization should we hope to see, averaged over a day or two? It’s a very general question, and it’s not clear it should have a single answer. That said, for a long time…