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Systems & Performance
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2131

Service mesh use cases (2020)

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…

2150

Windows 3.x VDDVGA

While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…

2152

ECC RAM should be a human right

I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…

2156

Huge pages are a good idea

Nearly all programs are written to access virtual memory addresses, which the CPU must translate to physical addresses. These translations are usually fast because the mappings are cached in the CPU's Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) . Unfortunately, virtual memory on x86 has used a 4 kiB page size since the 386 was…