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We're migrating many of our servers from Linux to FreeBSD
More about this in the article I wrote to accompany my talk at EuroBSDCon 2024 . Please note: This article was (unexpectedly) quite popular and many...
Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
<small>Pssst! Formatting messed up? Add ".md" to the url ✨ If you're stuck using Zoom, jump on [one](https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meet...
Roblox October Outage Postmortem
Roblox is a global platform where millions of people gather together every day to imagine, create, and share experiences with each other in immersive, user-generated 3D worlds.
MicroShift
MicroShift has been specifically designed for edge computing use cases, with a goal of fitting in the limited storage capacity of field-deployed devices that can be embedded into a variety of appliances such as cars, factory lines, airplanes or even satellites.
Tricking PostgreSQL into using an insane, but faster, query plan
At Spacelift, we use PostgreSQL (specifically Aurora Serverless) for most of our primary database needs. This article will show you our optimization story and how PostgreSQL row count estimation can go very wrong.
PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks
PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.
Systemd service sandboxing and security hardening (2020)
The systemd-analyze security command gives your systemd service units an automated security rating. This is a good starting point for security hardening.
Making Your Game Go Fast by Asking Windows Nicely
How to stop Windows throttling your game, set DPI awareness programatically, use Application Manifests in Rust and prefer discrete GPUs to integrated in OpenGL.
Life at 800 MHz
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
Async Rust in Practice: Performance, Pitfalls, Profiling
Learn how our developers used flamegraphs to diagnose and resolve performance issues in our Tokio framework based Rust driver.
New SysJoker Backdoor Targets Windows, Linux, and macOS
In December 2021, we discovered a new multi-platform backdoor that targets Windows, Mac, and Linux that we have named SysJoker.
LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
The James Webb Space Telescope – making 300 points of failure reliable
The JWST must perform a bewildering array of tasks — unfurling panels, mirrors and more — how can engineers trust telescope’s reliability?
Saving a Third of Our Memory by Re-Ordering Go Struct Fields (2020)
Simply changing the order of some uint variables we managed to drop our memory usage significantly
My 70 year old mother has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years
My mother turned 70, February 2021, and she has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years. My mother-in-law is 65, she has been using Linux on the desktop since 2015.
Commodore 900: Unix-like workstation/server that was eclipsed by Amiga (2020)
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
Computers as I used to love them
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
OpenBSD Webzine Issue #6
Webzine created by volunteers who are passionate about the OpenBSD project development.
Do Not Log
Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I a...