Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,945 posts.
Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE
Diskless Linux Boot
A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster
Building a 4-node cluster for experimenting with the distributed operating system.
Curl doesn’t spew binary anymore
One of the least favorite habits of curl during all these years, I've been told, is when users forget to instruct the command line tool where to store the downloaded file and as a direct consequence, curl instead sends a lot of binary "gunk" to the terminal. The end result of that is at best … Continue reading curl…
Building a QNX 7 Desktop
Describes the process of building a QNX 7 x86_64 machine from (almost) scratch.
Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with one weird trick
As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark …
On mutex performance and WTF::Lock
One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…
PostgreSQL on ARM-Based AWS EC2 Instances
With the second gen of Graviton2 instances announced, we decided to take a look at the price/performance from the standpoint of running PostgreSQL.
I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
How to sleep a million years (2013)
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
A short review and troubleshooting guide.
Three Tales of Second System Syndrome
In the last decade, three major scripting languages embarked on project to produce a major revision to each language: Perl 6, Python 3, and...
How Many X86-64 Instructions Are There Anyway?
Personal website of Stefan Heule
My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed
My personal website and blog
What Can I Do About Bufferbloat?
Bufferbloat is high latency (or lag) that occurs when there’s other traffic on your network. This means that your network isn’t always responsive - it’s wasting your time.
Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon
The transition to Apple Silicon brought about many exciting things, but one of the capabilities left behind was access to the world of Intel-based virtual machines. X86_64 just isn't a trivial architecture to emulate, and it may never be feasible to do so on Apple Silicon at a useful speed as the operating systems you…
I Built Linux from Scratch
Linux From Scratch or LFS is a project that provides and maintains a set of instructions of how to build your own Linux system from scratch. I am always curious to understand how things work ‘under the hood’, and since I’m a daily Linux user i decided to take on the challenge to try and complete building Linux From…
Microservice Trade-Offs
The microservices architecture can be useful, but to know if it's suitable in your context you need to understand its costs and benefits.
OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport
OpenBSD's share/misc/airport file and a day trip to Lublin
Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design
Deliver modern applications with NGINX. Explore high-performance load balancing, API gateways, and web server solutions trusted by top global enterprises.
How We Found 7 TiB of Memory Just Sitting Around
How we saved 7 TiB of memory across our Kubernetes clusters by disabling namespace listwatching in Vector, reducing daemonset overhead and API server load at scale.
Stream and Go: News feeds for 300M users, built on RocksDB and Raft
Discover the tech stack used by Stream. Explore 42 tools across 5 categories.
The curious case of slow downloads
Some time ago we discovered that certain very slow downloads were getting abruptly terminated and began investigating whether that was a client (i.e. web browser) or server (i.e. us) problem.