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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…
We need programming, but do we need the program?
The next person that says “Linux Containers will solve all our problems” is going to get taken out back and shot. This is a surefire way to…
When considering to build a high availability cluster based on Linux, it’s easy to find all kinds of how-to’s explaining the basic tooling and configuration. Most of them forget to explain some of the basic concepts of high availability. In this post I’ll try to explain them. To build a high availability cluster that…
Kernel modules are object files used to extend an operating system’s kernel functionality at run time .
How to check your Mac is booting in Full Security, and how to read its log to verify all the key steps involved in that process.
Created 18 years ago by Peter Kankowski Last changed 17 years ago Contributors : Dap and Adam Messinger Filed under Low-level code optimization
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…
This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on.The first fe…
A while ago I wrote a small file watcher in Go for my own use with an accompanying blog post . I needed a tool that I could just plop in front of the command I was running as part of my iteration loop. I use it for recompiling C files when I modify them,
This is Part 2 in a series of posts describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a list of posts in the series:
Industrial production of readable insanity
Take a moment to go back in time with me, back to when life was simpler and the biggest threat to humanity was Y2k…
Personal website of Benedikt Meurer, JavaScript Engine Hacker and Programming Language Enthusiast.
This post is the last in a three-part series about Cranelift . In the first post , I covered overall context and the instruction-selection problem; in the second post , I took a deep dive into compiler performance via careful algorithmic design.
Kernel Line Tracing: Linux perf Rides the Rocket
They say “performance is king’… It was true a decade ago and it certainly is now. With more and more data the world generates each day, we need more and more computing power to process it. It used to be the case that some SW vendors preferred to wait for a new generation of HW to speed up their application and did not…
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
It's no surprise that modern deep-learning libraries have production-level, highly-optimized implementations of most operations. But just what is the black magic that these libraries use that we mere mortals don't? What exactly does one do to "optimize" or accelerate neural networks operations?
I maintain two builds of the Linux kernel, a linux/arm64 build for gokrazy, my Go appliance platform, which started out on the Raspberry Pi, and then a linux/amd64 one for router7, which runs on PCs. The update process for both of these builds is entirely automated, meaning new Linux kernel releases are automatically…
Over the course of working on PSRayTracing (PSRT), I've been trying to find all sorts of tricks and techniques to squeeze out more performance from this C++ project. Most of it tends to be alternative algorithms, code rewriting, and adjusting data structures. I thought sprinkling the final keyword like an all purpose…
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one.
In the beginning, there was the egg. Then fictional people started eating that from different ends, and the terms of "little endians" an...
In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks. The first commit had only a few…
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
Facts, directions, and thoughts regarding the evolution of OpenBSD framebuffer consoles
