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Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
I have long wanted to create my own desktop operating system targeting the Raspberry Pi. I believe we should have a hackable desktop environment that is both powerful and lightweight, similar to BeOS and the Amiga. To build this desktop we really need full control over how apps draw to the screen, but still have…
V8: A Year with Spectre
The V8 team details their analysis and mitigation strategy for Spectre, one of the top computer security issues of 2018.
O(N^2) in CreateProcess
So many possible introductions to this one: Windows 7: Sheesh, I sure am slow at creating processes Windows 10: Hold my beer… Or how about: A) How long does CreateProcess take on Windows? B) How lo…
Making the obvious code fast (2016)
Jonathan Blow of “The Witness” fame likes to talk about just typing the obvious code first. Usually it will turnout to be fast enough. If it doesn’t, you c...
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys’19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been…
Virtually Unlimited Memory: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox
Posted by Mark Brand, Exploit Technique Archaeologist.IntroductionAfter discovering a collection ...
Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database
It has been almost 9 months since I started my sabbatical work with the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB team. I knew what I signed up for then...
Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Firefox Beta for Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon Now Available
Today, we’re excited to report the availability of our ARM64-native build of Firefox for Snapdragon-powered Windows 10 Always Connected PCs in our beta release channel, a channel aimed at developers or early tech adopters to test upcoming features before they’re released to consumers.
NVMM: A full, fast and flexible virtualization stack for NetBSD
NVMM provides the infrastructure needed for both the kernel driver and the userland emulators.
A fork() in the road
The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]
Measuring the overhead of WebAssembly using libsodium
The libsodium cryptographic library added support for WebAssembly back in 2017.
Native image lazy-loading for the web
In this post, we’ll look at the new loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web!. For the curious, here’s a ...
HermiTux: A Binary-Compatible Unikernel
A binary-compatible unikernel
GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening, But They’re Almost Done
This is week "1111111111" in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week "0000000000". How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we've seen so far!
Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system
Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system Yun & Zhong et al., NDSS’19 Suppose you did go to the extreme length of establishing an unconditional root of …
Correctness – A paradigm for sustainable software development
Edit (2019-04-09): A quick qualifier for future readers. This post talks about correctness in the sense of correct code and not formal proofs or formal specifications. I refer to correctness in the sense of avoidable runtime errors.
Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it
A while ago, I put 16 GB of RAM into one of my computers. The computer is using a Foxconn P55MX motherboard with a Core i5 750. It’s old and could probably be replaced, but it still works for what I need.
PostgreSQL Performance on Raspberry Pi
Have you ever wondered how well PostgreSQL performs on a Raspberry Pi 3B ? Oh. You haven't? Oh well, I asked myself that question and put it to the test. This post covers how I used pgbench to answer this question and the results of what I found.
Microsoft finds privilege escalation vulnerability in Huawei driver
Our discovery of two privilege escalation vulnerabilities in a driver highlights the strength of Microsoft Defender ATP’s sensors. These sensors expose anomalous behavior and give SecOps personnel the intelligence and tools to investigate threats, as we did.
Compiler Performance and LLVM
I have always wanted the Cone compiler to be fast. Faster build times make it easier and more pleasant for the programmer to iterate and experiment quickly. Compilers built for speed, such as Turbo Pascal, D and Go, win praise and loyalty. Languages that struggle more with this, like C++ or Rust, get regular…
Why Do Buses Bunch?
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .