571
Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
572
Running Pong in 240 browser tabs
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
573
A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS
Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a…
574
575
Git for Windows accidentally creates NTFS alternate data streams
As part of the small minority of devs at my company who primarily run Windows, I’m accustomed to working around occasional Unix-specific behaviors in our build and deployment systems. Cygwin makes most stuff just work, I can fix simple incompatibilities myself, and as a last resort I can always boot into OSX for a…
576
Python: The Optimization Ladder
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
577
The compiler will optimize that away
A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…
578
M1 Macs have another hidden boot mode
Apple has revealed the hidden Fallback Recovery OS mode available on M1 Macs. How to enter and use it, and why it’s another big plus.
579
Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
580
Why Android can't use CDC Ethernet (2023)
A detective story with a silly ending
581
Scaling GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
582
Cloud VM benchmarks 2026
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
583
584
Turning SQLite into a Distributed Database
mvSQLite is the open-source , SQLite-compatible distributed database. We decoupled SQLite's storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet "bottomless" scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.
585
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
586
The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now
When the Compute Module 4 was released (see my CM4 review here), I asked the Pi Foundation engineers when we might be able to boot off NVMe storage, since it was trivially easy to use with the exposed PCIe x1 lane on the CM4 IO Board. The initial response in October 2020 was "we'll see". Luckily, after more people…
587
Gentoo Tesla – T2 Edition
Location Voiture Electrique à la journée, le week-end ou au mois. Dès 50€/jour. Oubliez les agences de location. Assurance tous risques.
588
I 10x'd a TI-84 emulator's speed by replacing a switch-case
There’s a javascript emulator for the TI83+, TI84+, and TI84+CSE calculators called jsTIfied, which was written by Christopher Mitchell, founder of the calculator fan site cemetech.net. There’s not a whole lot of reasons to use it over something else if you’ve got a native option available, but if you don’t it’s…
589
The File Filesystem (2021)
mount semi-structured data (like JSON) as a Unix filesystem
590
591
592
Htop Explained Visually
htop is a great tool but lacks good documentation. This article takes a visual and simple approach to explaining htop.
593
We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at Netflix
Our CPUs were dying, the bug was temporarily un-fixable, and we had no viable path forward. Here's how we managed to survive.
594
How Uber Uses Zig
I talked at the first Zig meetup in Milan about Uber's early experience with Zig: a little about how Uber uses Zig and more about my experience of bringing Zig to Uber, from both technical and social aspects.
595
596
The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
597
Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
598
ECC RAM on AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs
Getting ECC memory working on desktop CPUs.
599
The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
600
MP3 for Image Compression (2006)
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…