991
Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,945 posts.
992
WASM Wayland Web (WWW)
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
993
macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
994
Distributed systems programming has stalled
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
995
There isn't much point to HTTP/2 past the load balancer
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
996
Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
997
Tokio and Prctl = Nasty Bug
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
998
999
Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver (2022)
Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer
1000
On Running systemd-nspawn Containers (2022)
I’d like to talk more about a container technology that I really like that I touched upon in a previous article : systemd-nspawn .
1001
Running Pong in 240 browser tabs
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
1002
When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
1003
Debugging Hetzner: Uncovering failures with powerstat, sensors, and dmidecode
About a year ago, Hetzner launched the AX162 server line. It offered better price / performance than its predecessor, AX161. We were very excited to adopt it, but we soon encountered serious reliability issues. We observed that the new servers had 16 times higher annual failure rates.
1004
Kafka at the low end: how bad can it get?
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
1005
Debugging an Undebuggable App
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
1006
0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
1007
Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
Oh look what you just made there.
1008
I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
1009
IPv6 Is Hard
Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…
1010
Siren Call of SQLite on the Server
At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…
1011
Linux kernel cgroups writeback high CPU troubleshooting
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
1012
Extensible WASM Applications with Go
Go 1.24 enhances WebAssembly capabilities with function export and reactor mode
1013
Reassessing Wayland
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…
1014
Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI
Can we have a faster FFI for CRuby? Yes.
1015
WASM will replace containers
WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience.
1016
Boring tech is mature, not old
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
1017
Writing a simple windows driver in Rust
The Rust language ecosystem is growing each day, its popularity increasing, and with good reason. It’s the only mainstream language that provides memory and concurrency safety at compile time…
1018
1019
How to scale your model: A systems view of LLMs on TPUs
Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn't have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your…
1020
No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming
Can Rust replace C? This is a question that has been on my mind for many years,as I created and now am tech lead forupb, a C libraryfor Protocol Buffers. Th...