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Basic Facts about GPUs
Making sure I don’t forget what I read.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Fast LLM Inference From Scratch (using CUDA)
This post is about building an LLM inference engine using C++ and CUDA from scratch without libraries.
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Authenticated Boot and Disk Encryption on Linux
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Faster CRC32 on the Apple M1
CRC32 is a checksum first proposed in 1961, and now used in a wide variety of performance sensitive contexts, from file formats (zip, png, gzip) to filesystems (ext4, btrfs) and protocols (like eth…
605
An IRC client in your motherboard
I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the…
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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control
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Actually Queryable Executables
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
608
Go performance from version 1.2 to 1.18
Shows how much the performance of Go has improved from version 1.2 through to 1.18 -- in its compiler, runtime, and libraries.
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Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
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Linux Pipes Are Slow
Errata: Some significant mistakes were pointed out to me by email by Brendan MacDonell. I have included errata, but the results might not be reliable, so take this with pinch of salt! vmsplice is too fast Some programs use a particular system call “vmsplice” to move data faster through a pipe. Francesco already did a…
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How PostgreSQL stores rows
poking inside postgres pages
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MySQL is bazillion times faster than MemSQL
I don’t like stupid benchmarks, as they waste my time. I don’t like stupid marketing, as it wastes my time too. Sometimes I succumb to those things, and now in return I want to waste yo…
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How I tripped over the Debian weak keys vulnerability
Those of you who haven’t been in IT for far, far too long might not know that next month will be the 16th(!) anniversary of the disclosure of what was, at the time, a fairly earth-shattering revelation: that for about 18 months, the Debian OpenSSL package was generating entirely predictable private keys .
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ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD
I’ve been using FreeBSD as my primary server OS for quite a long time. But, for unknown reasons, I have never seriously used it on client workstations. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a CUI-oriented person who loves doing things on text terminals as much as possible. Actually, I have been pretty happy with any client OS…
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APFS is not safe to use with names which have Unicode normalisation issues
APFS is not currently safe to use with names which might have Unicode normalisation issues – which means it is only safe with a limited ASCII character set.
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Systems design explains the world: volume 1
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...
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I'm not feeling the async pressure
An introduction to back pressure in systems and why it matters.
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Beating Google's kernelCTF PoW using AVX512
PoW is gone 🦀🦀
623
Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin
Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLite CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardware, it’s possible to …
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Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
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Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a… Continue reading →
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BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
627
Writing an OS in Rust: Advanced Paging
This post explains techniques to make the physical page table frames accessible to our kernel. It then uses such a technique to implement a function t…
628
I sped up serde_json strings by 20%
I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for…
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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
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