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Adding 16 kb page size to Android
Android 15 has been refactored to support using 16 KB page sizes, and file systems like EROFS and F2FS have been made compatible.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,945 posts.
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The journey of an internet packet: Exploring networks with traceroute
This article explains the mechanics behind traceroute, from IP headers and TTL fields to ICMP messages. Learn why traceroute is a crucial tool for network diagnostics, how it differs from ping, and how to interpret its output. Ideal for network administrators, IT professionals, and curious users looking to understand…
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Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs…
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Async2 – The .NET Runtime Async experiment concludes
The .NET team has been working on a new experiment called async2, which is a new implementation of the async/await pattern that is designed to be more efficient and more flexible than the current implementation. It started with green threads and ended with an experiment that moves async and await to the runtime. This…
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Hardware Virtualization
Project overview QEMU is a virtual machine which allows running an operating system inside of another. While there already is a Haiku port, it currently does not support any acceleration system through native virtualization (through Intel VT-x and …
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I sped up serde_json strings by 20%
I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for…
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SIMD Matters: Graph Coloring
SIMD in game development Often in game development we talk about SIMD. It is the holy grail of CPU performance, often out of reach. The conventional wisdom is that it is difficult to achieve real gains from SIMD. It is tempting to build a math library around SIMD hoping to get some performance gains. However, it often…
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Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
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Async hazard: MMAP is blocking IO
Memory-mapping a file is convenient, but it's a hazard when used with async/await concurrent code: it means a "simple" memory index does blocking IO.
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Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
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Making database systems usable
C. J. Date's Sigmod 1983 keynote, "Database Usability", was prescient. Usability is the most important thing to the customers. They care les...
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The LMAX Architecture (2011)
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
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Re-fixing Servo's event-loop
A follow-up on a previous story, in which we identify another problem, and perhaps confirm a theory through a theorem.
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Building a highly-available web service without a database
In this viral post, we explain a new paradigm of building simple clean apps: from prototyping to scaling up.
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How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months
Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services.
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Jepsen: Jetcd 0.8.2
Etcd is a coordination service designed to offer Strict Serializable reads, writes, and micro-transactions over a small, in-memory key-value store. In 2022, Jepsen re-tested etcd as a part of a private engagement covering an assortment of databases. We reported several issues to the etcd team during that engagement…
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How we found and fixed an eBPF Linux kernel vulnerability
This blog post takes a look at the years where eBPF was one of the kernel subsystems that grabbed the attention of a lot of security researchers. We will tell the story of how we discovered CVE-2023-2163, what our root-cause analysis process looked like, and what we did to ultimately fix the issue.
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Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
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Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%. This goal will be achieved through a high-level design overhaul…
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Debugging a rustc segfault on Illumos
Using `mdb` and `pmap` to find the cause of a crash.
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C++'s `noexcept` can sometimes help or hurt performance
Over the course of working on PSRayTracing (PSRT), I've been trying to find all sorts of tricks and techniques to squeeze out more performance from this C++ project. Most of it tends to be alternative algorithms, code rewriting, and adjusting data structures. I thought sprinkling the final keyword like an all purpose…
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A cryptographically secure bootloader for RISC-V in Rust
A summary of a Codethink sponsored project which implements a cryptographically secure bootloader, written in Rust, for RISC-V.
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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Revisiting Linux CPU Scheduling
Disclaimer: This is to the best of my knowledge. It's a complicated topic, there are tons of options, and this only covers a tiny fraction of this topic anyway. If you spot mistakes, please tell me.
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Towards userspaceification of POSIX – part I: signal handling and IO
The Redox official website
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Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
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`find` + `mkdir` is Turing complete
We show that a system that has only GNU's find and mkdir commands is Turing-complete.