The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 533 posts.
The consensus problem is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems which requires a group of processes (or agents) to reliably and timely agree on a single data value. Although extensively discussed in the context of distributed computing it’s not exclusive to this field, also being present in our society in a…
In my job as a scientific software developer, I tend to write a lot of code. And most people who haven’t been through a Computer Science degree tend to think that CS is “just” about slinging code at the screen and then running it. I have a good working relationship with many of my colleagues and co-workers with other…
The choice will not really be Windows or Linux, it will be whether you boot Hyper-V or KVM first, and Windows and Ubuntu stacks will be tuned to run well on the other.
Here's an in-depth recap of debugging a GitLab issue that culminated in a patch for the Linux kernel.
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.
I plan to write a series of articles to discuss some simple but not embarrassingly parallel algorithms. These will have practical usages and would most likely be on many-core CPUs or CUDA GPUs. Today’s is the first one to discuss a parallel algorithm implementation for CSV file parser.
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper computer:…
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
QUIC is a new networking transport protocol that combines the features of TCP, TLS, and more. HTTP/3 is the latest version of HTTP, the prot...
Let’s talk about that thing nobody’s talking about. Let’s talk about a vulnerability that’s exposing 2018-2020 Macs while most are declining to act nor report about the matter. Oh, and did I mention it’s unpatchable?
Spiral journey over kubernetes, cloud and devops world.
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …
The Xen Project is excited to share that the Xen Hypervisor now runs on Raspberry Pi. This is an exciting step for both hobbyists and industries. Read more to learn about how Xen now runs on RPi and how to get started. Written by Stefano Stabellini and Roman Shaposhnik, originally
[Thanks for many comments and votes on Hacker News! ] It’s been two years since I started working as a software engineer. I sometimes tell my colleagues about a student project I did in my junior year of university, and it’s so well-received that I’m writing this post. 1 Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever…
Fibers, Oh My! # Written by Dale Weiler, last updated Oct 5th, 2020 Twitter GitHub It’s been brought to the attention of many people in the game development industry that you can use fibers to parallelize your engines and games. This one presentation in particular: Parallelizing the Naughty Dog engine using fibers has…
I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
A community and blog for embedded software makers
APFS adds 6 volume roles, including one which supports Time Machine backups. And per-file encryption is coming.
Durability is the guarantee that data can be accessed after a failure. It seems like this should be very simple: either your system provides durable data storage, or it does not. However, durability is not a binary yes/no property, and instead should be defined as the kinds of failures you want your data to survive…
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
My job these days is teaching TLA+ and formal methods: specifying designs to find bugs in them. But just knowing the syntax isn’t enough to write specs, and it helps to have examples to draw from. I recently read Chris Siebenmann’s Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy and thought it would make a good case study…
The story of debugging a mysterious Julia segfault.
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers can result in an integer that cannot be represented in the integer type. We often refer to such error conditions as overflows. In a programming languages…
This post is based on an internal training I prepared for my employer, Locksley, and showcases some source-level techniques for improving C++ compilation times.
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
