1621
Archiving Steam games for fun and profit
Why do I do this to myself? I have no idea. Anyway, let's learn how to eat disk space.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
1622
June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)
Upgrade CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to supported systems with Red Hat's in-place solutions
1623
1624
OpenBSD Workstation Hardening
In this blog post, you will learn different methods to harden your OpenBSD system, and in which situation they are useful
1625
Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
1626
GCC Specs: An Introduction
If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…
1627
Sieve is simpler than LRU
SIEVE is Simpler than LRU: an Efficient Turn-Key Eviction Algorithm for Web Caches
1628
QEMU AioContext removal and how it was done
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
1629
Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
1630
Nim on a Real-Time Operating System: Apache NuttX RTOS and Ox64 BL808 SBC
Let's blink an LED on Pine64 Ox64 BL808 64-bit RISC-V Single-Board Computer... With Nim Programming Language and Apache NuttX Real-Time Operating System
1631
I forked SteamOS for my living room PC
SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive…
1632
Understanding Parquet, Iceberg and Data Lakehouses
In the past few years, I've heard a lot about Avro, Parquet, ORC, Arrow and Feather, but I also keep hearing about Iceberg and Delta Lake. As a "database person", I’ve been struggling to understand all of these different things, and how they relate to Data Lakes and
1633
Gentoo goes Binary
News and information from Gentoo Linux
1634
Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Before Apple had even released its Developer Transition Kit, virtualisation was already one of the 3 pillars of software support on Apple silicon Macs.
1635
Unprivileged process injection techniques in Linux
I'm joev, a security engineer 👋 You may know me from my work at Apple or on Metasploit, or from my CVEs.
1636
PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements
I recently finished reading PostgreSQL 14 Internals by Egor Rogov. It is one of the great books that teach applied computer science without watering down the difficult parts. One particularly interesting topic is PostgreSQL’s execution of UPDATE statements. Updates in relational databases are inherently complex. They…
1637
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
1638
Non-interactive SSH password authentication
Instead of using sshpass to non-interactively provide an SSH password, here is a simpler approach by harnessing the built-in features of OpenSSH...
1639
Understanding every byte in a WASM module
In my last post, we explored how to build WASM modules, both with and without WASI support, using Clang. In a comment on Reddit, it was mentioned that much of the setup I walked through in that post could be avoided by just leveraging Zig’s WASI supprt. This is a great point, and I would recommend doing the same. The…
1640
How Pinterest scaled
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
1641
Database Isolation Is Broken and You Should Care
The database zeitgeist has decided that ANSI SQL '92 isn't enough. We need something better.
1642
Trying chDB, an embeddable ClickHouse engine
A lightweight in-process SQL OLAP engine, powered by ClickHouse.
1643
Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34
MySQL needs little introduction. Over the last 28 years it has become one of the most widely deployed SQL databases. MySQL is primarily used for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, but is also deployed as a part of OLAP and queuing systems.
1644
Hardware Intrinsics in .NET 8
.NET 8 includes significant improvements to the Hardware Intrinsics feature.
1645
Ruby 3.3's YJIT: Faster While Using Less Memory
This year, the YJIT team has been working hard to improve and optimize YJIT. We’re proud to say that the version of YJIT to be included with Ruby 3.3 is leaps and bounds ahead of Ruby 3.2’s. It provides better performance across the board, while also warming up faster and using less memory. The 3.3 release is also…
1646
Python, C, Assembly – Faster Cosine Similarity
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
1647
Transaction Isolation in Postgres
Ever dealt with glitches in a SaaS platform where your actions don't seem to sync up? That's often a transaction isolation issue in databases. Lets talk about transaction isolation and how they work in Postgres, so you can write reliable and performant code with minimal headache.
1648
How many CPU cores can you use in parallel?
Figuring out how much parallelism your program can use is surprisingly tricky.
1649
Tracking Java native memory with JDK flight recorder
As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for …
1650
Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...