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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 343 posts.
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Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages filesystem on SSDs with KB4592438 installed
[German]In Windows 10 20H2 with installed cumulative update KB4592438, chkdsk causes massive issues. It destroys the file system during a disk check on SSDs, so Windows 10 can’t start after a reboot.
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1195725856 and other mysterious numbers
Last week was the final week for this half's performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last h...
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How are Unix pipes implemented?
The implementation and history of an iconic Unix feature, with excerpts from the v6 Unix kernel source code, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen
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14,000x Speedup (2015)
In my job as a scientific software developer, I tend to write a lot of code. And most people who haven’t been through a Computer Science degree tend to think that CS is “just” about slinging code at the screen and then running it. I have a good working relationship with many of my colleagues and co-workers with other…
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Getting started with bare-metal assembly
Seeing a program you wrote running directly on the bare metal is deeply satisfying to anyone who enjoys writing software. And it turns out that creating such a program from scratch is easier than it sounds. The hardest part is figuring out where to start. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to write, build and run the…
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Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
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I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
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Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V
The M1 is the beginning of a paradigm shift, which will benefit RISC-V microprocessors, but not the way you think.
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On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
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How Do Routers Work, Really?
An accessible overview of how exactly a router works, with code examples.
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FreeBSD is an amazing operating system
This is a small article about some of my adventures with FreeBSD and why I believe it is an amazing operating system.
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Non-Posix File Systems
Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…
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Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
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Mutexes are faster than Spinlocks
(at least on commodity desktop Linux with stock settings)
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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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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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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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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 [...]
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Everything I Know About SSDs
March 2019: Introduction: I started writing this rather long page for my own benefit, when I acquired a upgrade from my old 2006 Win 8 250 gb HDD PC to a Dell Optiflex 3010 with a 128 gb SSD. I never used more than 30 or 40 gb of the system drive, and I'm not a gamer or an avid film or music collector either. Not on a…
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Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
For the last few years, Microsoft has stated during event keynotes and in other places that Linux is a rapidly growing operating system (OS) being used within Microsoft Azure. They had proudly stat…