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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
A few months ago I got to debug and fix an interesting bug in the Csharp virtual terminal library VtNetCore . We use VtNetCore at BastionZero to extract terminal commands in realtime from user terminal sessions as they flow over the wire. This requires feeding the standard out and standard err of a terminal session…
I have been saying for years that I am seeing the same phenomonon today that I saw thirty years ago when the microprocessor was first invented. At that time I argued a lot with all the computer scientists. They insisted that microprocessors were not really computers because they did not run the same software that…
I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/outpu...
Version 0.9 of the Zig programming language is planned to release in about a week. One of the major changes coming in this release is a restructuring of how allocators work, which has been termed Allocgate . This is a breaking change to the Allocator API provided by the standard library, so pretty much any code that…
If you've ever look at the disassembly output for C or C++ code, you'll probably notice that there are a lot of push/pop instructions. And if you pay close enough attention, you'll notice that the compiler prefers to use certain registers over others. In particular, compilers will prefer pushing "old" registers like…
Using QUIC to achieve everything needed for NAT traversal, from address discovery to proxying UDP
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…
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…
Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is.
I own a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook, a ChromeOS 2-in-1 ARM64 tablet. I had been running ChromeOS, then postmarketOS, which suddenly broke. Time for some firmware hacking to try and get Ubuntu to run there!
Every time we press a key in an interactive SSH session, the SSH Client sends that keystroke as a TCP segment to the SSH Server. Here is a Wireshark …
My recent remark about the future of ChromeOS generated a surprisingly passionate response . Some said that my prediction was obvious and b...
Recent switch of official Firefox builds to Clang on all platforms has triggered some questions about the quality of code produced by GCC c...
Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…
We'll get to the shrinking, but first let's motivate the binary in question. Three years ago I wrote the "Surfacing Hidden Change to Pull Requests" post which covered pushing important stats and diffs into PRs as a comment. This avoids surprises with changes that affect binary size, manifests, and dependency trees.
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
What are Linux keyring, gnome-keyring, Secret Service, and D-Bus - a brief overview and usage examples
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
Moving Past the Scaling Myth - Discontinuous Transition in Process and Architecture
I build and maintain smf - the fastest RPC in the west.The main language supported is C++. We use Seastar asthe actual asynchronous framework.
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In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…
After Firefox , I decided to look into LibreOffice performance with link time optimizations (LTO) and profile feedback (FDO). This post was ...
In the previous article we explored how the Go runtime bootstraps itself — how a Go binary goes from the operating system handing it control to your func main() running. During that bootstrap, one of the first things the runtime sets up is the memory allocator. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. Think of…
I’m working on the Roc Toolkit open-source project, a development kit for realtime audio streaming over the network. You can read more about the project in these two articles: 1, 2. We decided to implement a set of PulseAudio modules that will allow PulseAudio to use Roc as a network transport. Many Linux distros…
