511
Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs. NixOS
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 582 posts.
512
Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...
513
Filesystems can experience at least three different sorts of errors
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
514
Scaling Git’s garbage collection
A tour of recent work to re-engineer Git’s garbage collection process to scale to our largest and most active repositories.
515
Going multipath without Multipath TCP
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
516
A System-Witch’s Package Manager Murder Mystery
It was a calm day on the puppy-linux thinkpad. The CPU was cool, the RAM was operating at double data rate, and a gentle breeze flowed through the chassis as the fan whirred away. A girl wanted to log onto Discord to chat with her friends, but much to her dismay, Discord needed a package update! No matter, such things…
517
Build Unix, Not Uber
I spent the last three weeks in Seoul, partly visiting family I hadn’t seen in years and partly taking a vacation from my usual work in my usual city in my usual context of life. While I haven’t been able to work much at all, I spent my subway rides and waiting-in-line times reading the Singularity Sky series of…
518
Java BitSet performance-flicker mystery
Why does the performance of this prime sieve, using a Java BitSet, flicker between either decent performance and half of that?
519
GNU/Linux shell related internals
What every SRE should know about GNU/Linux shell related internals: file descriptors, pipes, terminals, user sessions, process groups and daemons # Last updated: Oct 2025 Contents File descriptor and open file description Pipes Process groups, jobs and sessions Terminals and pseudoterminals Despite the era of…
520
Notes on ExFAT and Reliability (2021)
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
521
Converting integers to decimal strings faster with AVX-512
In most systems, integers are stored using a fixed binary representation. It is common to store integers using 32-bit or 64-bit words. You sometimes need to convert it to a string. For example, the integer 12345 might need to be converted to the five characters '12345'. In an earlier blog post, I presented the simpler…
522
Prefix Sum with SIMD
In other words, the $k$-th element of the output sequence is the sum of the first $k$ elements of the input sequence.
523
Escaping privileged containers for fun
Despite the fact that it is not a 'real' vulnerability, escaping privileged Docker containers is nevertheless pretty funny. And because there will always be people who will come up with reasons or excuses to run a privileged container (even though you really shouldn't), this could really be handy at some point in the…
524
Don’t Trust Activity Monitor on M1 Macs
Using CPU % or Energy values in Activity Monitor appears to show that running code on E cores is less efficient than on P cores. Don’t believe a word of it.
525
Using eBPF and predefined inspections to minimize “observability tax”
Learn how Coroot uses eBPF and predefined inspections to achieve fast, code-free monitoring with minimal observability overhead.
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527
The Tower of Weakenings: Memory Models for Everyone
In my previous article I looked at the ways that Rust could be better at pointers. Half of the problems were fundamental issues that affect basically every programming language that lets you mess with pointers directly, and the other half were rust-specific issues. My article also proposed two solutions: for the…
528
Compilers and IRs: LLVM IR, SPIR-V, and MLIR
Overall discussion on compilers and IRs (LLVM IR, SPIR-V, and MLIR): why they are in their current manner and how they would evolve
529
Partitioning in Postgres, 2022 Edition
Tracking improvements to Postgres partitioning since 2017. In just five years it’s gone from a non-feature to a very good one.
530
Memory safety for the world’s largest software project
Rust for Linux and Prossimo The Rust for Linux project aims to bring a new system programming language into the Linux kernel. Rust has a key property that makes it very interesting to consider as the second language in the kernel: it guarantees no undefined behavior takes place (as long as unsafe code is sound)…
531
Speeding up Go's built-in JSON encoder for large arrays of objects
I was looking into some of octosql 's benchmarks the other day and noticed a large chunk of time in DataStation / dsq is spent in encoding JSON objects. JSON is an intermediate format in DataStation and it's pretty inefficient. But the reason it's used is because almost every scripting language supported by…
532
OpenBSD Webzine Issue #6
Webzine created by volunteers who are passionate about the OpenBSD project development.
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Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
535
How to make sure no dynamic memory is used
How to disable heap (dynamic memory allocation) in an embedded application? This article goes into the details of linker files and how to detect dynamic memory allocation.
536
A Faster Lexer in Go
It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple techniques. The last lexer written, in Go, was very fast indeed - processing 1 MiB of source in about 20…
537
AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine
In this technical deep dive, we take a look at the columnar engine that delivers industry leading query performance for AlloyDB for PostgreSQL.
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How we wound up with Linux's kernel mode setting ('KMS')
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
540
89 Operating Systems
I occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something abut curl's coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. This is current incarnation of…