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Firmware Updates and Initial Performance Data for Data Center Systems
Intel Newsroom delivers the latest news, announcements, and updates. Stay informed on Intel innovations.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 458 posts.
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Fast base64 encoding and decoding
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
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Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With ...
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Why code that never goes wrong can still be wrong
The three levels of software, a framework by Jimmy Koppel: runtime, code, and logic, and why code that never fails can still be wrong.
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Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
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Long-Term Consequences of Spectre and Its Mitigations
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
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Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++, Part 2
Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++ that runs on macOS, Linux and WSL - Part 2
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DNSFS – Store files in others' DNS resolver caches
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
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Things you must know before you can understand Meltdown as a developer
Meltdown is a cache-timing attack on Intel CPUs that allows all memory to be read by any process because of how they do Speculative Execution.
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How to sleep a million years (2013)
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
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Spectre and the end of langsec
wingolog: article: spectre and the end of langsec
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Detecting Spectre and Meltdown Using Hardware Performance Counters
Security pros have been working on a new hardware attack type that exploits cache side-effects and speculative execution to perform privileged memory disclosure.
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The State of Atom's Performance
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
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Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
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Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Scaling Message Delivery
In part two of this series we discussed data replication within the context of a distributed log and how it relates to high availability. Next, we’ll look at what it takes to scale the log such that it can handle non-trivial workloads. Data Scalability A key part of scaling any kind of data-intensive system is the…
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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How the JVM compares strings on x86 using pcmpestri
We’ve all probably seen Java’s String comparison function before. It compares strings by the first differing character, falling back to the length difference when they are identical up to the end of the shorter string:
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
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Modern Linux in an ancient PC
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
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Potential Impact of Spectre on Processors in the Power family
View, search and download security bulletin information for individual IBM product versions and releases.
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Xen Project Spectre/Meltdown FAQ
Updated to v3 on Dec 12th! Google’s Project Zero announced several information leak vulnerabilities affecting all modern superscalar processors. Details can be found on their blog, and in the Xen Project Advisory 254. To help our users understand the impact and our next steps forward, we put together the
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