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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
This one is going to be a quick one as there wasn't anything new discovered. In fact, I feel quite dumb. This is really a tale of " Do your research before acting and know what your goal is, " as you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time. Nobody likes throwing away work they've done either, and there could be…
First, I want to tell you how exactly I got to this point and why I started researching different options for handling asynchronous I/O on Linux… Last year, my students and I built a reverse proxy server called TinyGate. It was super simple, worker-based, and it basically worked well. Of course, I didn’t expect it to…
Go 1.26 made Green Tea the default GC. We observe its cache-friendliness with perf, visualize the heap to see how Go allocates, and poke at a sparse-page problem a non-moving collector like Go's struggles with.
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
The async/await saga is a story where each chapter solves the previous chapter's worst problem while introducing new structural costs. The sequential syntax that made async code readable also obscures the thing that matters: which operations actually depend on each other.
A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
malloc has a very nice and simple interface: you ask for a certain amount of memory, and you’re given a void pointer to your block of contiguous bytes that’s been magicked into existence. Once you’re done with it, you call free with the same pointer and the memory disappears into the ether.
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
And why you would want to exec a cpio
I stopped working on the reverse-engineered Apple Neural Engine (ANE) driver three years ago, upon a sad mini realization that the ANE block is just not that useful, and I could be doing more useful things, and moved onto upstreaming other, more useful, blocks. The ANE's architecture was too opinionated to build a…
macOS Internals Deep Dive Building a Development Kernel Collection Configuring our Mac to boot the Development Kernel Collection Putting our machine to work! When did Apple grace us with this feature? Undoing our work for OS updates Closing Thoughts
How an undefined behavior in C made me pull my hair out for days but became my first patch to the Linux kernel!
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full bl...
I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently ...
KO | EN | Discussions on HN I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.6...
I think it is incredibly cool that we can change a Linux system into a networking device. But have you ever wondered:
The AI surge has DRAM producers like Micron focus on HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) to serve AI hyperscalers over the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) used by ordinary consumers and small businesses. Consequently, for instance, servers which used to cost $2500 on Newegg now cost $5000. RAM alone is $2500 now.
Fixing common Java anti-patterns took an app from 1,198ms to 239ms. Eight patterns that compile fine and pass code review but silently drain CPU and balloon heap, with benchmarks and code fixes for each
A Game Boy emulator runs faster than a native interpreter by dynamically recompiling SM83 to WebAssembly, effectively making JIT possible on iOS.
How Wirewiki's domain-name autocomplete renders suggestions next frame for 99% of keystrokes.
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
