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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 343 posts.
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…
At Buffer, we’ve been using Kubernetes since 2016. We’ve been managing our k8s (kubernetes) cluster with kops, it has about 60 nodes (on AWS), and runs about 1500 containers. Our transition to a micro-service architecture has been full of trial and errors. Even after a few years running k8s, we are still learning its…
How to accurately measure latency on Linux
An essay that bids farewell to x87 – a computing architecture too long for this world.
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. The SpaceX Starship is a game changer for space exploration. It is intended to be far bigger, cheaper, versatile, and available t…
Initially, I wasn’t sure whether to write about this migration project, but when I randomly asked if people would be interested, the response was overwhelming. This was a long, kind of boring, very repetitive, and at times incredibly frustrating project, but I learned a lot, and maybe someone else will learn from this…
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
In this post I'll provide some of my personal experience and history working with BGP, and introduce a new BGP library, CoreBGP, which can be used to build the next generation of BGP-enabled applications.
My job these days is teaching TLA+ and formal methods: specifying designs to find bugs in them. But just knowing the syntax isn’t enough to write specs, and it helps to have examples to draw from. I recently read Chris Siebenmann’s Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy and thought it would make a good case study…
In this blog post I tell my experience mounting a minimalist homelab with a Intel NUC and the ESXi hypervisor.
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…
Recently, I’ve started to explore RISC-V. I experienced the journey as pretty refreshing, particularly because I’ve been working on x86 low-level software almost exclusively for about 10 years.
The consensus problem is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems which requires a group of processes (or agents) to reliably and timely agree on a single data value. Although extensively discussed in the context of distributed computing it’s not exclusive to this field, also being present in our society in a…
x86 is back in the general programmer discourse, in part thanks to Apple’s M1 and Rosetta 2 . As such, I figured I’d do yet another x86-64 post.
I sense this sentiment on the internet that RAID is dangerous, that the likelihood of your RAID array failing during a rebuild is almost a certainty, because hard drives have become so large.
Databases shed important RDMS features as they get big. Examining why this tends to be the case, and some ideas for preventing it.
It’s already been a great reading day for retrospectives on the last ten years / predictions for the next. Here’s to hoping that everyone had a good break (or at least a few days off), set or didn’t set resolutions, and is refreshed and ready for what comes next.
Today, I wanted to see if I could out-compile my C compiler. I added a hand-compiled assembly version of echo from our previous coding exercise and added a new make target, make asm , that will assemble it. Let's look at our hand-compiled assembly and compare it to our C compiler and ask whether or not it was worth it.
Learn how to load larger-than-memory NumPy arrays from disk using either mmap() (using numpy.memmap), or the very similar Zarr and HDF5 file formats.
It's 2020. Quarantines are everywhere – and here I'm writing about one, too. But this quarantine is of a different kind. In this article I'll describe the Linux Kernel Heap Quarantine that I developed for mitigating kernel use-after-free exploitation.
Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voices which say FreeBSD is dead, Linux is the way to go. Most of the time those voices are trolls, or people which do not really know what FreeBSD has to offer. Sometimes those voices wear blinders, they only see their
If you’ve been unable to create a bootable external disk to use with your M1 Mac, this explains what you need and its limitations and quirks.
A common myth about USB keyboards is that they can only support 6-key rollover, and not report more than 6 keys being pressed at a time. In fact, this is wholly untrue; the USB HID device class can support full N-key rollover (NKRO). While keyboards which purport to support USB NKRO are now common, some of them have…
When was the last time you played a computer game? I really like one of Benjamin Franklin quotes – “We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.̶…
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
