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Booting to Rust
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in Rust
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
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Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches (2018)
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in coll…
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Zero Cost Abstractions
Rust claims to enable abstraction without overhead. How does that claim hold up in practice?
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How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
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PHP 7 Virtual Machine
This article aims to provide an overview of the Zend Virtual Machine, as it is found in PHP 7. This is not a comprehensive description, but I try to cover most of the important parts, as well as some of the finer details.
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Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time
cybersecurity, tech, and personal annoyance log
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Who killed the network switch? A Hubris Bug Story
A Hubris Bug Story
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What is a control system anyway?
Hopefully some signal in the noise.
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Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential
If you have followed Windows 10 at all during the last few years, you know that the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL for short, is the hot topic among developers. You can finally run your Linux tooling on Windows as a first class citizen, which means you no longer have to learn PowerShell or, god forbid, suffer…
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Archival Storage
I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...
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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
In this article, you will learn what stands behind the label immutable when it comes to Linux systems
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Exploring Clang/LLVM optimization on programming horror
Recently, I’ve come across a not so efficient implementation of a isEven function (from r/programminghorror ).
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I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years
So there I was, implementing a one element ring buffer. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a perfectly reasonable data structure.
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Nobody knows how the whole system works
One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
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Distributed Systems Shibboleths
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
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Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
During me being at my parents over the holidays (Christmas 2017) I had the usual IT-support stuff to do, that always happens to tech sa...
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What developers should know about TCP
Why do you need to place your servers geographically close to your users? One of the reasons is to achieve lower latencies. That makes a lot of sense when you are sending short bursts of data that should be delivered as quickly as possible. But what about large files, such as videos? Surely there is a latency penalty…
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5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
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What's in a Linux Executable?
Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed somet...
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Virtualizing iOS on Apple Silicon
Nick Botticelli's personal website
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Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom
I will attempt to convince you, in two lines of code, that Elixir is more interesting than any programming language you’ve ever used.
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How modern Linux systems boot
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…
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A tale of webpage speed, or throwing away React
Back in 2011, I happened to get a job writing Backbone.js app. If you never did that, don’t. I was complaining about difficulties with composition left and right to [...]