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Debian riscv64
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...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 555 posts.
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ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
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...
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Threads and Goroutines
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…
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What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (2021)
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…
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How does iCloud work? Plus a new version of Cirrus
Differences between CloudKit and iCloud Drive, what each does, and how it works. New version of Cirrus to test and check iCloud function.
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Making the most of Apple Silicon power: 2 Core capabilities (2022)
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 …
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Resilience in Complex Systems (2021)
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.
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Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
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.
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What we talk about when we talk about system design
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…
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How Turborepo is porting from Go to Rust
Our strategy for making updates and maintaining stability while we migrate languages.
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Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common
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.
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Cold restart whole system after total outage
"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.
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Remote code execution in OpenSSH’s forwarded SSH-agent
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.
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Bfs 3.0: The Fastest Find Yet
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…
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Payment systems while working at a pizza place
Placing an order and capturing a payment are really different actions. I also learned a lot in a few days.
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What's wrong with enterprise Linux
An examination of what is wrong with the Enterprise Linux model and a recommendation for a middle ground.
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PostgreSQL: No More Vacuum, No More Bloat
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…
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Minify and Gzip (2022)
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.
259
Why can’t you just roll back from a bad macOS update?
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?
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Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
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
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Patching GCC to build Actually Portable Executables
Gautham's Blog
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Understanding Kafka with Factorio (2019)
While playing Factorio the other day, I was struck by the many similarities with Apache Kafka.
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Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25905 brings a bit of Rust in the kernel
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25905 to the Canary Channel. We are releasing ISOs for this build – they can be downloaded here. Starting with to
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Storing Data in Control Flow
A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much…
266
ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: Tablets
How moving from Vnode-based replication to tablets helps dynamically distribute data across the cluster, ultimately increasing ScyllaDB’s elasticity.
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Back-end parallelism in the Rust compiler
This post describes some performance work I have been doing recently on rustc. I spent several weeks on a particular problem with only a small amount of success. I hope a write-up will be interesting and educational, and may even lead to suggestions that make things better. The post is aimed at readers with some…
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SUSE is forking RHEL
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment
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NixOS and my descent into insanity
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently...