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Four features that justify a new Unix shell
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snapshots
In this article, I present the Linux file system NILFS and its automatic continuous snapshoting system.
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Random number generator enhancements for Linux 5.17 and 5.18
The random number generator has undergone a few important changes for Linux 5.17 and 5.18, in an attempt to modernize both the code and the cryptography used. The smaller part of these will be released with 5.17 on Sunday, while the larger part will be merged into 5.18 on Monday, which should receive its first release…
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RISC-V OS using Rust: Filesystems
I have taught operating systems at my university, so I will link my notes from that course here regarding the virt I/O protocol. This protocol has changed over the years, but the one that QEMU implements is the legacy MMIO interface.
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Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned
Console is the epitome of Apple’s problem with tools and support for its users, and is exactly what it needs to fix.
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Hello, Youki
First release of youki, an OCI container runtime written in Rust
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WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
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…
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Glory is only 11MB/sec away (2023)
One thing is certain in life: if you’re getting something for a steal, someone is getting screwed, and it’s probably you elsewhere. This isn’t an anti-capitalist rant, it’s just the truth. Companies don’t exist if they don’t make money. Unless there’s some innovation, rest assured that you’re overpaying somewhere else.
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The One Billion Row Challenge in CUDA
On my journey to learn CUDA, I decided to tackle the One Billion Row Challenge with it.
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SSH quoting
A while back there was a thread on one of our company mailing lists about SSH quoting, and I posted a long answer to it. Since then a few people have asked me questions that caused me to reach for it, so I thought it might be helpful if I …
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Linux is an interpreter
And why you would want to exec a cpio
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Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
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…
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Anatomy of an ELF executable
Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…
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IPv6 Is Hard
Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…
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So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here , here , and here ), at the Kangrejos Rust for Linux Workshop ( here , here , and here ) and 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit . At least…
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Files Are Fraught with Peril
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
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Microsoft confirms Exchange Year 2022 problem
[German]Exchange servers (on-premises) have had woldwide a Year 2022 problem since January 1 (00:00 UTC), because mails are no longer transported due to a “date error”. Meanwhile…
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My VM is lighter and safer than your container
My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container Manco et al., SOSP’17 Can we have the improved isolation of VMs, with the efficiency of containers? In today’s paper choice the authors investigate …
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Examining ARM vs. x86 Memory Models with Rust
With Apple’s recent announcement that they are moving away from Intel X86 CPU’s to their own ARM CPU’s for future laptops and desktops I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the some differences that can affect systems programmers working in Rust.
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The broad set of computer science problems faced at cloud database companies
A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was
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Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
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How the JVM compares strings on x86 using pcmpestri
We’ve all probably seen Java’s String comparison function before. It compares strings by the first differing character, falling back to the length difference when they are identical up to the end of the shorter string: