Topics /
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…
[English]These are currently difficult times for customers and resellers of VMware products who want to reorder, extend licenses or simply activate product licenses. After the Broadcom takeover…
The performance of a processor is determined by several factors. For example, processors with a higher frequency tend to do more work per unit of time. Physics makes it difficult to produce processors that have higher frequency. Modern processors can execute many instructions per cycle. Thus a 3.4GHz processor has 3.4…
One little step toward UNIX
Once I finished writing ec2-boot-bench, the natural next step was to run some tests — in particular, to see how FreeBSD compared to other operating systems used in EC2. I used the c5.xlarge instance type and tested FreeBSD releases since 11.1-RELEASE (the first FreeBSD release which can run on the c5.xlarge instance…
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
Types of register explained, and which are available to pass arguments of different types. Call by value and call by reference distinguished.
Introduction Google has a long history of performing networking research, making changes, and pushing those changes to the entire internet. In 2011, they published one of my favorite papers, which described their decision to increase the TCP initial congestion window from 1 to 10 on their entire infrastructure. This…
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…
Let's create an hello world init program that the kernel can execute to show that everything works correctly:
setting up 20 year old hardware is bound to work first try, right? ... right?
In this post we'll discuss the second argument on why the epoll() is broken. The problem is best described in an LWN comment by Foom :
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 occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something abut curl's coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. This is current incarnation of…
How to Build Truly Portable eBPF Programs
My inspiration for this article was this thread in r/embedded . There are still many myths and misconception when it comes to the simple questions "Which compiler should I use?" or "Which compiler is the best?". I will try to share my practical experience with GCC, Clang and IAR on Cortex-M ( and Cortex-M only ). This…
I was incredibly inspired by Tomasz Stachowiak’s hack of GCN . It made me wish I owned a GCN machine of my own to start trying insane things with. On the other hand, I dooo own an Intel Haswell GPU , and they dooo publish some really dense documentation that’s allegedly enough to write a complete driver with.
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
Root election, port roles, proposals and agreements, topology changes: explore RSTP through simulations powered by MSTPD compiled to WebAssembly.
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
