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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
A detailed walkthrough of the Linux boot process from power button to kernel initialization
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DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
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Leaky Abstractions
In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond…
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63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions
I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how …
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop
I’d recently bought a new XPS13 7390 (non 2-in-1) laptop. I had bought the 8GB variant, how hard could it be to upgrade?
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How we ended up with microservices
Microservices are a thing these days.
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60x speed-up of Linux “perf”
The tool is great, but it uses perf to record and analyze profile data, and perf on Debian has a performance problem : when not linked against libbfd , it shells out to addr2line for every address it needs to look up. Thousands and thousands and thousands of incredibly short-lived processes.
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Make Linux look like Windows 95
Blasphemy? Probably! But still pretty awesome!
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Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming
Probability problems come up a lot in systems programming, and I’m using that term loosely to mean everything from operating systems programming and networking, to building large online services, to creating virtual worlds like in games. Here’s a bunch of rough-and-ready probability rules of thumb that are deeply…
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Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.
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I forked SteamOS for my living room PC
SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive…
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Fast Software, the Best Software
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
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Offline is just online with extreme latency
I just finished watching “Local-first Software” by Peter Van Hardenberg and loved it! He talks about changing the paradigm we’re currently in where a program…
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The Elephant at WWDC
Every developer should watch the 5 videos about DocC from WWDC. But it’s really a plaintive cry for help. Until Apple squares up and addresses the problem, it can only grow worse.
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PostmarketOS: Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones
Introduction post to postmarketOS , a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux with own packages, that can be installed on smartphones. (Not usable for most people yet!)
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Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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A Constructive Look at TempleOS
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
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Booting Linux off of Google Drive
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
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Google Chrome Keystone is modifying /var symlink on non SIP Macs causing k-panic
Reports that some AVID Users Macs would no longer boot. It now may be that a Google Chrome Keystone update modifies /var on NON SIP Protected Macs.
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Logs in High Sierra Show Plaintext Password for APFS Encrypted External Volumes
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST UPATE TO THE UPDATE: Similar log entries are now found in another system log that is more persistent, see the article here . UPDATE: This is still vulnerable on current versions of macOS 10.13.3 when encrypted an ALREADY EXISTING unencrypted APFS volume
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Linux containers in a few lines of code
Trying to figure out how Linux containers work by implementing them from scratch in C.
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BSD vs. Linux (2005)
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
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Picking Apart the Crashing iOS String
So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text …