1471
Big Sur is both 10.16 and 11.0
macOS 11.0 will identify itself differently according to the SDK used, and an environment variable does the same for scripts.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems
Patterns and structures of current operating systems and some thoughts about how that could be improved, with lessons learnt from Self, Smalltalk and other "structured" systems.
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How Unreliable is UDP?
Unlike TCP, UDP doesn't provide any delivery or ordering guarantees. Put into practice, just how bad, or good, is UDP?
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PDP-11 Booting
Instructions for booting a PDP-11/34 with RT-11 from a RK05
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An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages
Musings on the representation, propagation and handling of errors in existing programming languages, as well as thoughts on future systems. (15K+ words)
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Safe zero-copy operations in C#
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
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Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data
(Edit: This article is now up on hacker news, feel free to discuss there)
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Use fast data algorithms (2021)
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
1480
M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
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Unix recovery legend
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
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Ode to the M1
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts ( 900P and 905P ). All drives are…
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Running out of disk space in production
A tale about misconfiguring nginx, from adventures in production
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Our best practices are killing mobile web performance
Web performance rules invented for desktop web access need to be revised for the mobile era.
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Learning from OpenBSD can make computers marginally less horrible
The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…
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Understanding Google’s File System (2020)
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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The Linux Distributions of 1992
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
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The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines
Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Peering into the crystal ball Kubernetes as a technology has been very important to my career this year, and will be even more so for next year…
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Backpressure is all you need
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
1491
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
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We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Raspberry Pi – UASP, Trim, and Boot Performance via USB
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
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M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance
The P cores in the M1 Pro/Max CPU are managed in two groups of four, sparing load on the second group, and distributing it unevenly within each group. Its two E cores outperform the four in the M1 …
1500
Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…