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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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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 569 posts.
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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.
216
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…
220
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.
221
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…
223
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.
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Building static binaries with Go on Linux
One of Go's advantages is being able to produce statically-linked binaries [1] . This doesn't mean that Go always produces such binaries by default, however; in some scenarios it requires extra work to make this happen. Specifics here are OS-dependent; here we focus on Unix systems.
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Troubleshooting: Terminal Lag
I think I should blog more about random troubleshooting sessions, if nothing else it will remind me what steps I took when it inevitably happens again!
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tolower() with AVX-512
A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.
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How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
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Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
237
Lessons from Ancient File Systems
In my previous post , I mentioned that I found a number of oddities when digging through the details of various Atari 8-bit file systems. I...
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Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
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Linux Network Performance Ultimate Guide
https://blog.packagecloud.io/illustrated-guide-monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/
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Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650M checks
How I scaled One Million Checkboxes to handle half a million users