Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,387 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
871

Arena allocator tips and tricks

Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…

874

Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

In this regularly but rarely updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and shortcomings (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should…

883

Unix Syscalls

On UNIX-like operating systems, userland processes invoke kernel procedures using the "syscall" feature. Each syscall is identified by a "syscall number" and has a short list of parameters, which both can vary between operating systems, hardware platforms, and configuration options.

889

Big GPUs don't need big PCs

Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…

900

The Linux Graphics Stack

This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…