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Introduction to strace
There will come a time when you will find yourself asking “What the heck is that process doing?”. To uncover the mysteries behind the behaviour of a process, we have a tool called strace .
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.
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The Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter in AV1
AV1 is a new general-purpose video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance began development of the new codec using Google’s VPX codecs, Cisco’s Thor codec, and ...
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Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software [video]
Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) , Online (originally planned to be in Milan, Italy), July 2021.
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NetBSD 9.5 released and EOL for NetBSD-9
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.5, the fifth (and final) release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.
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S32 Unix Clock
I've been thinking I should do more "short form" blogging. Something between microblogging and regular blogging. This is me doing that!
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Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System (2025)
From paged attention, continuous batching, prefix caching, specdec, etc. to multi-GPU, multi-node dynamic serving at scale.
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Building a “Simple” Distributed System – Formal Verification
In the last post , we described a protocol that should satisfy the requirements and invariants established in the first post . Today we will look at formal verification with TLA+. Formal verification is just another (niche) tool in the toolbox. Some tools require more skill than others to use. So
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Linus Torvalds on aliasing
See also Dennis Ritchie on aliasing, PLOS article , pointer alias in C and remarks on the purpose of C.
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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
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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...
4242
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?
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Moore's law hits the roof
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
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The Heart of Unix (2018)
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
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Replacing HLS/Dash – Live Mass Fanout with Media over QUIC
Media over QUIC: Low-latency, high bitrate, mass fan-out is hard. Who knew?
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Parsing the .DS_Store File Format (2018)
About two years ago I came across a .DS_Store file and wanted to extract its information (e.g. file names). After researching the file format and its security implications, as well as writing a parser for it, I would like to share my (limited) knowledge and the parser in Go / Python with the world. You might want to…
4251
We rebuilt the Linux MicroVM stack on Apple Silicon
Firecracker needs KVM and therefore a Linux host, and the image tooling around it needs loop mounts and Linux userland. We rebuilt the stack on Apple's Virtualization.framework to boot the same OCI images as microVMs on macOS and on Linux.
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How does Linux handle writes?
I examine the somewhat surprising way how Linux handles writes.
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An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
Explore research at Microsoft, a site featuring the impact of research along with publications, products, downloads, and research careers.
4254
Unix Domain Sockets vs Loopback TCP Sockets (2014)
Two communicating processes on a single machine have a few options. They can use regular TCP sockets, UDP sockets, unix domain sockets, or shared memory. A recent project I was working on used Node…
4255
10 Years SeL4: Still the Best, Still Getting Better
A week ago, on 29 July, we at Trustworthy Systems celebrated seL4 Freedom Day, the 5th anniversary of the open-sourcing of seL4. Furthermore it was seL4’s 10th birthday – the annive…
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FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
Prototyping a Home NAS with RAID1 on FreeBSD on a virtual machine: system installation via SSH with bsdinstall, configuring ZFS mirror and working with datasets
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Digging for performance gold: finding hidden performance wins
We are fortunate that so many people choose Chrome as their browser to get things done, which is why we are continually investing in making ...
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Kong gateway reaches 1.0 GA, now supports service mesh
Kong 1.0 includes Service Mesh, Mutual TLS, and gRPC support; as well as a Plugin Development Kit.