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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 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…
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…
We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.
LLVM is a complex piece of software. There are several paths one may take on the quest of understanding how it works, none of which is simple. I recently had to dig in some areas of LLVM I was not previously familiar with, and this article is one of the outcomes of this quest.
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, waiting for any number…
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…
In the world of matching decompilation, projects use a tool which consumes an input binary and lifts objects for comparison and linkage.
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it. In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open…
The previous iteration of this article was too technical, too long, and contained a lot of controversial points, so I've been thinking for a long time about rewriting it completely, making it accessible to the non-technical folks, and exposing the deeper core issues that still make Linux a questionable match for the…
ZFS keeps winning over btrfs on many fronts. Here's a short list that explains exactly how.
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
The Clojure Core team recently released a new Clojure library, tools.build , that is a culmination of thought around batteries-included build support for Clojure projects. I won’t go into detail around the history and contents of the library in this post because much of that is found elsewhere, including the…
That's likely all you need to do to install and make default GNU grep, which on my machine is a ~10x speedup over the grep that ships with Mac OS.
Recently I’ve been rambling about the amazing improvements which will land with C++20 support in our toolchains. For those who haven’t had a look at those yet, I recommend checking out the summary in the following recent blog post: C++20: An Introduction. The Update We’ve All Been Waiting For? .
Resolving PS2SDK Soft Reset Issues
After nearly three years of work, I have a pleasure to announce that Qubes 1.0 has finally been released! To see the installation instructio...
Yesterday Lauri Vasama showed me this awesome Godbolt: struct S { static std::unique_ptr<S> make() noexcept; ~S(); static std::unique_ptr<S> factory() { std::unique_ptr<S> s = S::make(); return M(s); } }; void take_ownership(S*) noexcept; void test() { std::unique_ptr<S> p = S::factory()…
Code that shows how floating point arithmetic can go wrong, and how C and C++ can return different results for similar code.
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
You might have read that Mozilla recently switched Windows builds to clang-cl . More recently, those Windows builds have seen both PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) and LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled .
A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much…
A guide on writing beautiful native libraries in C or C++ that compile to native code.
