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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
After languishing through the CPU dark-ages (read: Intel trying real hard to keep people on 4 cores so they could charge an arm and a leg for more), the last two years has seen a vertible tsunami of advances in CPU technologies. AMD's introduction of an 8-core CPU (the 1700X) began the rat-race and with both AMD and…
The M1 is the beginning of a paradigm shift, which will benefit RISC-V microprocessors, but not the way you think.
Last year I got certified as an EMT. As part of the training I shadowed an ambulance for a day and assisted with each run. For each patient we treated, we had to fill out a patient care report. A patient care report. (source) EMTs are just one part in a long chain. If they transport a patient to a hospital, the…
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
New zine: Linux debugging tools you'll love
Feeling like a kid in a candy store, once more
Have you ever wondered about the performance delta between Caddy and Nginx? Wonder no more.
Thinking through how the conventional OSS security embargoes no longer buy us time, and what open source maintainers might do instead to respond
JPEG is a clever image compression algorithm that exploits a human perceptual bias and the structure of natural images. It makes a change of basis before encoding so that the rewritten image representation concentrates the signal that humans are most perceptive to, and thus, the remaining details can be discarded…
An accessible overview of how exactly a router works, with code examples.
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
In this post, we set up the programmable interrupt controller to correctly forward hardware interrupts to the CPU. To handle these interrupts, we add …
Dmitry.GR: I am often asked to explain my distaste for RISC-V. Here it is.
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost. Resize the system…
A cron job for every man, woman, and child.
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
This is a small article about some of my adventures with FreeBSD and why I believe it is an amazing operating system.
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
Today I landed yet another small change to libcurl internals that further reduces the number of small mallocs we do. This time the generic linked list functions got converted to become malloc-less (the way linked list functions should behave, really). Instrument mallocs I started out my quest a few weeks ago by…
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
A detailed blog post on optimizing multi-threaded matrix multiplication for x86 processors to achieve OpenBLAS/MKL-like performance. Tags: High-performance GEMM on CPU, Fast GEMM on CPU, High-performance matrix multiplication on CPU, Fast Matrix Multiplication on CPU, Matrix multiplication in C, GEMM in C, Matrix…
