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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
Last updated 6/26/2015 - 4:49 PM EST. -- Windows Update will be abbreviated as "WU" in text from myself. First of all, I had this incl...
A while back, I worked on a RISC-V-based userspace simulator for fun. In doing so, taught myself a lot more than I wanted to know about what happens in-between when the Kernel is asked to run a program, and when the first line of our program’s main function is actually executed. Here’s a summary of that rabbit hole.
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Several holidays ago, I got a bee in my bonnet and wrote a fast JSON parser whose parsed AST fits in a single contiguous block of memory. The code was small and simple and the performance was generally on-par with RapidJSON, so I stopped and moved on with my life.
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an…
I recently came up with a "clever" idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don't fall victim in the future.
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…
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...
TL;DR: We developed a compiler that automatically transforms LLM inference into a single megakernel — a fused GPU kernel that performs…
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
Hi, I’m SL . You may remember me from my classic appearances in contentious 9fans threads , or maybe you’ve read one of my books .
In online forums, I often see questions from people new to C++ asking for recommended reading. I usually respond with a certain set of trusted books, with the caveat that no amount of reading makes up for practice: you have to actually work on something. But what would be a good project to work on? Something that…
“iOS HFS Normalized UNICODE names, APFS now treats all files as a bag of bytes on iOS. We are requesting that Applications developers call the correct Normalization routines to make sure the file name contains the correct representation.”
A catalog of patterns to better understand, communicate, and teach the design of distributed systems
If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about.
The time has come to talk about something uncomfortable to a lot of you. You’ve been using legacy methods for far too long. It’s time to move to IPv6. But, of course, there’s a lot more to IPv6 than ‘just’ switching everything over. A lot of systems in the world still haven’t…
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
By a strange coincidence the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all. Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome. It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and…
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the...
In the past few years, I've heard a lot about Avro, Parquet, ORC, Arrow and Feather, but I also keep hearing about Iceberg and Delta Lake. As a "database person", I’ve been struggling to understand all of these different things, and how they relate to Data Lakes and
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it's inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it's not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it…
A lot of tech discussion these days is focused around scaling infrastructures to handle huge traffic. But it's important not to forget how far simple optimizations can go.
Yes I know about that one talk from Rob Pike.
