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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.

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3608

Real VT102 Emulation with MAME

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…

3609

NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5

In my video about the Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!). Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a…

3614

ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained

ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term " ARM64EC ". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC?

3616

SSE: mind the gap

SSE and SSE2 are available in every single x86-family CPU with 64-bit support. You too can play around with SIMD, which is great fun! Unfortunately, SSE2 level in particular also happens to be what…

3618

Not all OCuLink eGPU docks are created equal

I recently tried using the Minisforum DEG1 GPU Dock with a Raspberry Pi 500+, using an M.2 to OCuLink adapter, and this chenyang SFF-8611 Cable. After figuring out there's a power button on the DEG1 (which needs to be turned on), and after fiddling around with the switches on the PCB (hidden under the large metal…

3620

Kernel debugging for newbies

This week, I’ve been working on an application that sets up IPsec connections. PF_KEYv2 is the standard interface for configuring IPsec. PF_KEYv2 is widely-available; even systems with more advanced IPsec stacks (like XFRM on Linux) provide a PF_KEYv2-compatible wrapper. I want my application to work on OS X and…