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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 377 posts.
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
So you decided to build a brand new system using all the latest and coolest tech, so you buy a Ryzen 7000 series Zen 4 CPU, like the Ryzen 7700X that I picked, with a new mother board and DDR5 memory
When programming, we often have to 'escape' strings. A standard way to do it is to insert the backslash character (\) before some characters such as the double quote. For example, the string my title is "La vie" becomes my title is \"La vie\" A simple routine in C++ to escape a string might look … Continue reading…
TLDR: ZFS free-space reporting is a lagging indicator. Background I use Proxmox VM server backed by a ZFS array of hard drives for various personal infrastructure. I also have security cameras that upload motion-triggered videos to my server (via FTP!). Problem Description I would like to use 90% of my available space…
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a system for synchronizing the clocks of hosts and clients across the Internet. NTP is a protocol intended to synchronize all computers participating in the network to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The core of the protocol is NTP’s clock discipline…
I’ve been thinking about WebAssembly a lot lately.
A large C++ codebase meets a new linker: The good, the bad and the performance improvements <a class="more-link" href="https://www.productive-cpp.com/using-the-mold-linker-for-fun-and-3x-8x-link-time-speedups/">... Read More</a>
I have been playing with some LTE recordings to brush up my knowledge, since it isn’t a protocol I’m very familiar with. I’m specially interested in understanding the structure and properties of all the pilot signals. Textbooks and documentation are great, but nothing beats getting your hands dirty with some IQ…
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
A blog about software.
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
"JVM Anatomy Quarks" is the on-going mini-post series, where every post is describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM. The name underlines the fact that the single post cannot be taken in isolation, and most pieces described here are going to readily interact with each other.
Hello everybody, I hope you’ve been enjoying this summer after two years of Covid and lockdowns :D In this post I’m going to describe how to use eBPF syscall t…
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…
Introduction The case for open addressing SIMD-accelerated lookup boost::unordered_flat_map data structure Rehashing Hash post-mixing Sta...
Tonight's story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn't make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound...
I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written. Video is a different beast, entirely. Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format…
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
On the 3rd of August 2016, an Emirates Boeing 777 landing in Dubai attempted a last second go-around after touching down too far along the…
Where Flow-based Programming stands after 50 years since its introduction. What problems it solves today. And what problems it can solve tomorrow for broader Software Engineering industry
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...
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…
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
