Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Consider this tale of I/O and performance. We’ll start with blocking I/O, explore io_uring and kqueue, and take home an event loop very similar to some software you may find familiar.
Let's explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer. We’ll try to make sense of all this, one thing at a time, with a logical and coherent approach.
Initial kernel and subsystem support for new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 posted for review. Learn what’s in the patches and how you can start working with them.
My take on Windows NT subsystems and the thin line between VMs and subsystems.
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
Learn about the architectural innovations we used to build a 130,000-node Kubernetes cluster, and the trends driving demand for these environments.
How dare you!
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…
Many products at Cloudflare aren’t possible without pushing the limits of network hardware and software to deliver improved performance, increased efficiency, or novel capabilities such as soft-unicast, our method for sharing IP subnets across data centers. Happily, most people do not need to know the intricacies of…
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD . This post is an English transcription of the original French slides that are available here .
In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks. The first commit had only a few…
A short review and troubleshooting guide.
What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.
multi silicon ai is coming
After my previous post on ARM exploitation, where we crafted an exploit for a known vulnerability, I decided to continue the research on a more modern IoT target. In this follow-up post, I will take you through building a considerably more complex binary exploit. We will explore the path from firmware extraction and…
See how we diagnosed and confirmed an AWS Aurora RDS race condition impacting failovers.
multi silicon ai is coming
We used to use software; now software started to use us
In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…
Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…
Every field of human activity has its unique characteristics, and programming is no exception.
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
To redesign infrastructure, you have to allow incremental adoption, while simultaneously moving the whole design space at once.