The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
I ended up getting a response from high level people at AMD. It was still very light on any real technical information, but it did include some great phrases like “I am able to replicate the issues you are facing” and some mockable phrases like “We are hoping that this will improve your perception of AMD products and…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Directfs is now the default in runsc. This feature gives gVisor’s application kernel (the Sentry) secure direct access to the container filesystem, avoiding expensive round trips to the filesystem gofer. Learn more about this feature in the following blog that was originally posted on Google Open Source Blog .
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
Window management is one of those areas I'm fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we've relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are...
I have a super power. I want to share it in this blog post so that you, my dear reader, also have it!
My inspiration for this article was this thread in r/embedded . There are still many myths and misconception when it comes to the simple questions "Which compiler should I use?" or "Which compiler is the best?". I will try to share my practical experience with GCC, Clang and IAR on Cortex-M ( and Cortex-M only ). This…
These extensions expand the x86 instruction set with access to registers and features that improve performance.
If you remove the first word from the string "hello world" , what should the result be? This is the story of how we discovered that the answer could be your root password!
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the...
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
So after several years of reading oversimplified and flat out incorrect comments about threads and fibers/goroutines/async/etc and fighting this reaction: I’ve decided to write my own still-over-simplified all in one guide to the difference between a couple popular threads and fiber implementations. In order to…
How to have fun with the world’s most important free software project "Functional, free and secure by default", OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open source field. This talk aims to highlight the project's signature security features and development practices -- razor sharp focus on…
Differences between CloudKit and iCloud Drive, what each does, and how it works. New version of Cirrus to test and check iCloud function.
P cores are conventional in that they can deliver excellent performance at maximum frequency, but with high power use. E cores may take 4 times as long for a task, but use less than a third of the …
Everyday human reasoning breaks down as the scale of time and space at play increases. Complex systems thinking gives us a new set of tools to better understand the chains of consequences involved, and make better decisions.
Talk transcript on various patterns that slowly influence how teams deal with reliability, and highlight some of the key interactions and behaviors I keep finding work well in the organizations I've been part of.
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet…
Our strategy for making updates and maintaining stability while we migrate languages.
I was wondering: how often do nanosecond timestamps collide on modern systems? The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time. As a result, I think it is unsafe to assume that a raw nanosecond timestamp is a unique identifier.
"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.
CVE-2023-38408 is a remote code execution flaw in OpenSSH’s forwarded ssh-agent. Get full exploit details, impact analysis, and Qualys detection guidance.
bfs is a tool I wrote to do b readth- f irst s earch through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it’s grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations. The new 3.0 release series includes the biggest new feature so far…
Placing an order and capturing a payment are really different actions. I also learned a lot in a few days.
An examination of what is wrong with the Enterprise Linux model and a recommendation for a middle ground.
PostgreSQL, a powerful open-source object-relational database system, has been lauded for its robustness, functionality, and flexibility. However, it is not without its challenges – one of which is the notorious VACUUM process. However, the dawn of a new era is upon us with OrioleDB, a novel engine designed for…
I've been doing a bit of work cleaning up the CSS on this blog in the past couple days — the CSS is from a template that I copied more than five years ago at this point, and it was pretty crufty even when I first got it.
If it’s so easy to uninstall a troublesome RSR, why can’t we simply roll back to a previous version of macOS, like we did in High Sierra?
Most of my readers will understand that cache is a fast but small type of memory that stores recently accessed memory locations. This description is
