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Bootkitty: Analyzing the first UEFI bootkit for Linux
ESET's discovery of the first UEFI bootkit designed for Linux sendss an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 170 posts.
92
Autotuner: How to speed up your Rails app
Ruby’s garbage collector is designed to be adaptable, scaling from short Ruby scripts to running apps that serve millions of requests per second. While it’s designed to be adaptable, it may not work optimally for every use case. For this reason, Ruby’s garbage collector supports many parameters that can be used to…
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94
Understanding QEMU Devices (2018)
Here are some notes that may help newcomers understand what is actually happening with QEMU devices:
95
SVDQuant: 4-Bit Quantization Powers 12B Flux on a 16GB 4090 GPU with 3x Speedup
A new post-training training quantization paradigm for diffusion models, which quantize both the weights and activations of FLUX.1 to 4 bits, achieving 3.5× memory and 8.7× latency reduction on a 16GB laptop 4090 GPU. Code: https://www.github.com/mit-han-lab/nunchaku
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A transport protocol's view of Starlink
How TCP interacts with the characteristics of the Starlink service.
97
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,
98
Discord Reduced WebSocket Traffic by 40%
How we rolled out zstandard and other improvements across our gateway cluster to reduce the amount of bandwidth that’s used by our clients.
99
Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite
Discover the power of Snapdragon X Elite with upstreamed Linux kernel support. Explore areas of focus and unlock new potential with Snapdragon Linux today.
100
Load is not what you should balance: Introducing Prequal
Bartek Wydrowski, Google Research; Robert Kleinberg, Google Research and Cornell; Stephen M. Rumble, Google (YouTube); Aaron Archer, Google Research
101
Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection
In this post we look at the impact of a new feature of Ruby 3.4 on Shopify’s monolith.
102
Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts
This week's Internet cable cuts in the Baltic Sea have been widely reported, even as attempts to understand their cause and impact continue. We turn to RIPE Atlas to provide a preliminary analysis of these events and ask to what extent the Internet in the region has been resilient to them.
103
Hyperlight: Virtual machine-based security for functions at scale
The Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team is excited to announce the Hyperlight project, an open-source Rust library you can use to create very small VMs for embedded functions. Learn more.
104
Bit-twiddling optimizations in Zed's Rope
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio walk through the performance optimizations Antonio when working on Zed's Rope data structure before they then pair on adding more optimizations
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Perfctl: Stealthy malware targeting Linux servers
Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent malware employing several sophisticated techniques
106
X.org on NetBSD – The State of Things
A few years ago, I wrote a "state of things" blog post about Wayland on NetBSD . It's only natural that I should do one about X11, which is used by far more people to get a graphical environment on NetBSD.
107
Mark–Scavenge: Waiting for Trash to Take Itself Out
This blog post summarises a new garbage collection algorithm called Mark-Scavenge, which highlights how using reachability as a proxy for liveness in moving GCs leads to unnecessary data movement and how we can address this. This work is from the latest paper within the research collaboration between Oracle and…
108
Speeding up C++ build times
How we cut build times by 50% and shipped a solution for scale.
109
We sped up time series by 20-30x
This is a follow up post that dives into how we managed to achieve such huge performance gains for time series (among other things), and why it was so hard in the first place.
110
Optimizing the Ion compiler back end
In September, machine learning engineers at Mozilla filed a bug report indicating that Firefox was consuming excessive memory and CPU resources while running Microsoft’s ONNX Runtime (a machine learning library) compiled to WebAssembly.
111
Linux ext2 filesystem driver now marked as deprecated
31 years after the start of its career in 1993, it’s time for ext2 to retire. Here we are talking about the driver for this filesystem, not exactly the filesystem itself. Continue reading to understand the subtle difference.
112
FreeBSD 13.4-Release
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/13 branch.
113
Improving Network Performance with Linux Flowtables
We’re building an open source alternative to AWS. For IPv4 assignment and firewall rules, we use Linux’s Netfilter / Nftables. This subsystem provides a powerful way to handle packets addressed to the host. We recently came across flowtables - a network acceleration feature in the Linux kernel that works like a…
114
GPU synchronization in Godot 4.3 is getting a major upgrade
Say goodbye to placing barriers, hello to the new acyclic graph
115
The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
Long thought impossible, helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for high-capacity HDDs. This is the story the science behind them.
116
When "letting it crash" is not enough
This essay explores the connection between Erlang's process supervision, state management and durable execution.
117
There are only 12 binaries in Talos Linux
Updated October 2025 to reflect the growth in binaries from 12 to <50.
118
Using Postgres for Everything
What Postgres for Everything means to a dev deploying all sorts of databases. Spoiler: it’s about collapsing your stack and keeping it simple.
119
Compression efficiency with shared dictionaries in Chrome
Compression on the web is getting a big boost from shared dictionary compression. Learn what they are, how they work, and how they could substantially reduce load times even further than standard compression for both static and dynamic resources on the web.
120
Rustls Outperforms OpenSSL and BoringSSL
ISRG has been investing heavily in the Rustls TLS library over the past few years. Our goal is to create a library that is both memory safe and a leader in performance. Back in January of this year we published a post about the start of our performance journey. We've come a long way since then and we're excited to…