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Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,949 posts.
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MP3 for Image Compression (2006)
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…
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PHP 7 Virtual Machine
This article aims to provide an overview of the Zend Virtual Machine, as it is found in PHP 7. This is not a comprehensive description, but I try to cover most of the important parts, as well as some of the finer details.
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How to write a simple operating system
This document shows you how to write and build your first operating system in x86 assembly language. It explains what you need, the fundamentals of the PC boot process and assembly language, and how to take it further. The resulting OS will be very small (fitting into a bootloader) and have very few features, but it's…
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Preventing AMI’s BiOS from interfering with coreboot flashing on the Librem 13
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms
Today, Microsoft triaged a large release of exploits made publicly available by Shadow Brokers. Understandingly, customers have expressed concerns around the risk this disclosure potentially creates. Our engineers have investigated the disclosed exploits, and most of the exploits are already patched. Below is our…
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Taking a Look at CLR Thread Pool 'Thread Injection' Algorithm
As part of a never-ending quest to explore the CoreCLR source code I stumbled across the intriguing titled ‘HillClimbing.cpp’ source file. This post explains what it does and why.
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Ubuntu 17.04 Released
Ubuntu 17.04 released today, supporting Kubernetes, Docker, LXD and Snaps. This is the 26th release of Ubuntu, the world’s most widely deployed Linux OS and the leading platform for cloud and IoT operations. “The breadth and pace of open source innovation has made it the center of gravity in technology today, and the…
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HTTP/2 is not the future, it’s the present
Remember, in `may 1996`, the very first HTTP protocol version (HTTP/1.0) was born.
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Memory bandwidth
Absolute memory bandwidth figures tend to look fairly large, especially for GPUs. This is deceptive. It’s much more useful to relate memory bandwidth to say the number of clock cycles or inst…
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What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console
When Windows 10 Anniversary Update (AU) was shipped, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was still far from complete, and was known to have many
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Testing the Windows Subsystem for Linux
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Over the Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack (Part 2)
Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project ZeroIn this blog post we'll continue our journey into gaining re...
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Debugging macOS Kernel Using VirtualBox
Update: In the HN discussion, awalton mentioned you can set CPUID flags in VMWare. Simply adding cpuid.7.ebx = "-----------0--------------------" to the vmx file will disable SMAP. Late last year, I upgraded my old MBP to the 2016 model with a Skylake processor. As I was debugging a kernel exploit, it turned out that…
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Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Machine Learning in Computer Systems Research
In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” in which he explored the question of why mathematics is so r…
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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
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At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
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Building a scalable time-series database on PostgreSQL
We just announced the release of TimescaleDB, a new open-source time-series database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, now available on GitHub.
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Over the Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack
Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project ZeroIt’s a well understood fact that platform security is ...
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Please stop writing new serialization protocols
It seems that every day, some computer monkey comes up with a new and more groovy serialization protocol. In the beginning, there was ASN.1 and XDR, and it was good. I think ASN.1 came first, and l…
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On mutex performance and WTF::Lock
One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…
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What colour are your bits? (2004)
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
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Why is my tcp not reliable? (2009)
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
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Jepsen: CockroachDB beta-20160829
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database, loosely patterned after Google Spanner and designed for semi-synchronous networks. It speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol , supports a reasonable dialect of SQL , and combines replication for durability with transparent scale-out sharding for large tables. Its most…
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The .NET IL Interpreter
Whilst writing a previous blog post I stumbled across the .NET Interpreter, tucked away in the source code. Although, it I’d made even the smallest amount of effort to look for it, I’d have easily found it via the GitHub ‘magic’ file search: