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My first patch to the Linux kernel
How an undefined behavior in C made me pull my hair out for days but became my first patch to the Linux kernel!
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,945 posts.
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K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due
Kubernetes Service Meshes aren't free anymore, what teams need to know moving forward.
2105
I want a good parallel computer
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from…
2106
Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
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What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
(“This Week in Glean'' is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release ...
2109
The Xenon Death Flash: How a Camera Nearly Killed the Raspberry Pi 2
The bizarre story of how taking flash photos could instantly crash the Raspberry Pi 2, the community detective work that solved it, and why this strange bug revealed fundamental flaws in modern chip design.
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OCaml on Baremetal Shakti RISC-V Processor
It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group , we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extensions of the open-source Shakti RISC-V processor ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, my language of choice to build the…
2112
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…
2113
Grafana Tempo, a scalable distributed tracing system
Tempo is designed to be a robust trace id lookup store whose only dependency is object storage (GCS/S3).
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Myths about /dev/urandom
Randomness, entropy, and the Linux kernel.
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Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust (2020)
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years
When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to …
2119
Clock synchronization is a nightmare
Time seems simple. But we engineers lose sleep over something as basic as keeping clocks in sync. Here’s why…
2120
Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
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Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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The Unix process API is unreliable and unsafe (2021)
It is difficult to write software which reliably and safely manages processes on Unix; this is because of flaws in the API. I know of no Unix system which has solved these problems, but in this article I'll be specifically talking about the Linux process API.
2124
Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions
The portfolio of AWS storage products has grown increasingly rich and diverse over time. Amazon S3 started out with a single storage class and has grown to include storage classes for regular, infrequently accessed, and archived objects. Similarly, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) began with a single volume…
2125
Founding Uber SRE
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
2126
Things that surprised me while running SQLite in production
I've been using SQLite in several production projects for six months, and I've encountered some surprising aspects.
2127
Hey Synaptics, Can You Please Stop Polling
TL;DR – be wary of buying a Lenovo laptop or any other laptop that uses a Synaptics touch pad until Synaptics ships a fixed driver. Their driver has a memory leak and they have a battery-life bug t…
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Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower
Keeping workflow state and application data in the same Postgres database lets one transaction update both, simplifying idempotency and atomicity.
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A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, calle...