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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,945 posts.
1232
Exponential Rate Limiting
Following my previous post on rate limiting with GCRA, leaky buckets without the buckets , I reviewed my old notes on rate limiting for Exim . I thought I should do a new write-up of the ideas that I hope will be more broadly interesting.
1233
What is the best pointer tagging method?
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used…
1234
Linux's Bedtime Routine
How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.
1235
Don't defer Close() on writable files (2017)
It'll bite you some day
1236
WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
1237
Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?
Asynchronous IO (also known as "non-blocking IO") is a technique applications use to allow performing of many IO operations without blocking the calling OS thread, and without needing to spawn many threads (i.e. one thread per operation). In the late 1990s/early 2000s, an increasing amount of people using the internet…
1238
A Pipeline Made of Airbags
Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.
1239
Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux
I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targetin…
1240
Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling
An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.
1241
Pick Your Distributed Poison
One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency. The very...
1242
The Insecurity of Debian
The difference in security defaults between Debian and Red Hat.
1243
Why bother with argv[0]?
The first argument of a program’s command line, typically reflecting the program’s name/path and often referred to as argv[0], can in most cases be set to an arbitrary value without affecting the process’ flow. Making the case against argv[0], this post demonstrates how it can be used to deceive security analysts…
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How the Hourglass Won
The Internet's architecture is viewed as an hourglass: broad application support at the top, narrow waist (IP), wide choice of links below IP
1246
Upgrading a Toshiba NAS HDD Firmware on Linux
I reversed the firmware updater of my Toshiba HDD to be able to update it on Linux. The following commands should work, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK :
1247
A Real Life Off-by-One Error
The Championnats d’Europe d’Escalade (climbing) in Villars-sur-Ollon has just finished. I couldn’t make it to all the events, but did see the finals of the “Speed” event. It’s a series of head-to-head elimination races up a 15m tall wall, resulting in an eventual victor after enough rounds.
1248
Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
1249
Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
1250
Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k and ditching the C++ runtime
The {fmt} formatting library is known for its small binary footprint, often producing code that is several times smaller per function call compared to alternatives like IOStreams, Boost Format, or, somewhat ironically, tinyformat. This is mainly achieved through careful application of type erasure on various levels…
1251
Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
As you may, or may not know, I wrote paraLLEl-RDP back in 2020. It aimed at implementing the N64 RDP in Vulkan compute. Lightning fast, and extremely accurate, plus the added support of up-scaling on top. I’m quite happy how it turned out. Of course, the extreme accuracy was due to Angrylion being used as reference…
1252
Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian
Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general Linux systems was very…
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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
Teens wrote me a secret. I found them.
1255
How I learned to stop worrying and love userspace networking
Userspace wireguard is fun!
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Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V
What It Takes to Run The Witcher 3 on RiSC-V
1258
Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
1259
Erasure Coding for Distributed Systems
An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.
1260
Linux Pipes Are Slow
Errata: Some significant mistakes were pointed out to me by email by Brendan MacDonell. I have included errata, but the results might not be reliable, so take this with pinch of salt! vmsplice is too fast Some programs use a particular system call “vmsplice” to move data faster through a pipe. Francesco already did a…