The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,949 posts.
By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…
(Adapted from a Quora answer .) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 mode.…
We describe a systematic approach for replacing locks with tasks. In this approach thread blocking is replaced by properly scheduling of tasks.
Subtitle: Making Windows Slower Part 3: Process Destruction In the summer of 2017 I wrestled with a Windows performance problem. Process destruction was slow, serialized, and was blocking the syste…
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close…
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
Today we’re open sourcing the FoundationDB Document Layer, a document-oriented database that extends the core functionality of the FoundationDB key-value store.
Here's an in-depth recap of debugging a GitLab issue that culminated in a patch for the Linux kernel.
CockroachDB 2.1 is 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora at less than 2% of the price per tpmC. Read on to see performance benchmarks of CockroachDB 2.1, including the latest TPC-C results.
January 31, 2025: Post updated to clarify the reduced on-demand pricing and workloads recommendations. Just a few years ago, creating a database that could support your business at any scale while providing consistent low latency was a daunting task. That changed for me in 2012 while reading Werner Vogels’ blog post…
One of my favorite Amazon Leadership Principles is Customer Obsession. When we launched AWS Lambda, we focused on giving developers a secure serverless experience so that they could avoid managing infrastructure. In order to attain the desired level of isolation we used dedicated EC2 instances for each customer. This…
The experiments conducted from July until November at the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald have achieved higher values for the density and the energy content of the plasma and long discharge times of up to 100 seconds – record results for devices of the…
I was particularly interested in one of the consequences of how dynamic RAM works. You see, each bit of data is stored by the charge (or lack of it) on a tiny capacitor within the RAM chip. But these capacitors gradually lose their charge over time.
A common problem that we have seen come up in several projects, is how to plot large datasets over time in an efficient manner using Qt. Here is one approach that we have found to work well in some situations, maybe it helps you out in your project.
🦑 Informal definitions of terms used in concurrency modeling
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
FoundationDB 6.0.15, our first major release since open sourcing FoundationDB in April, is now officially available!
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
Michael Dexter returns to update his blog post on the different file systems and details some key developments that are unfolding. He covers what's being added to these respective file systems: OpenZFS, Btrfs, and bcachefs. Michael Dexter has invested his volunteer time and career in Open Source hypervisors and file…
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life.
As of last nightly (20181115100051), Firefox now supports Wayland on Linux, thanks to the work from Martin Stransky and Jan Horak, mostly.
Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain and too many other technical breakthroughs to list all share a common component - Linux, the same workhorse that has driven mission-critical, production systems for nearly two decades. Today, we’re offering a vision of a Linux foundation to power the…
Unikernels are customized, single address space bootable images composed of an application and the required bare-minimum kernel functionality. Today’s unikernels have demonstrated substantial performance and security advantages over monolithic and microkernels, but none have yet achieved widespread adoption. The…
Imagine waiting for your flight at the airport. Suddenly, an important business call with a high profile customer lights up your phone. Tons of background noise clutters up the soundscape around you…
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
