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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Assembly code scares people. There’s a good reason for that. For many people, writing code in assembly language seems equivalent to writing code in ancient dwarven runes, or calculating pi in roman numerals. The fact that RollerCoaster Tycoon was almost completely written in assembly language sounds almost too amazing…
Linux has an elegant and beautiful design when it comes to threads: threads are nothing more than processes that share a virtual address space and file descriptor table. Threads spawned by a process are additional child processes of the main “thread’s” parent process. They’re manipulated through the same process…
There's a fascinating Rust library, loom, which can be used to thoroughly test lock-free data structures. I always wanted to learn how it works. I still do! But recently I accidentally implemented a small toy which, I think, contains some of the loom's ideas, and it seems worthwhile to write about that. The goal here…
A few spy tools for your operating system (other than strace!)
On the concepts involved in a running program. What happens, exactly, when you double click an executable file, or launch it from the command line, and it begins to execute?
Father, Founder, and FuturistBuilding bestinterest.app and podcasting for coparents.Learn more about me.
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security you should seriously consider them.
By that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…
Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering Li et al., OSDI 2016 Everyone knows that consensus systems such as Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, and Raft impose high over…
For some reason, nobody's written about what it takes to crawl a big chunk of the web in a while: the last point of reference I saw was Michael Nielsen's post from 2012 .
Introducing Mempodipper , an exploit for CVE-2012-0056. /proc/ pid /mem is an interface for reading and writing, directly, process memory by seeking around with the same addresses as the process's virtual memory space. In 2.6.39, the protections against unauthorized access to /proc/ pid /mem were deemed sufficient…
Floodgap has had a T1 line since I moved into this house in 2011. I'm one of those weirdos who runs my own hardware and prefers to avoid ...
ramblings by Adam Perry
I wanted to write a post and do a bit of a deepdive into ICMP, ping and traceroute. I’ve found that having a good networking foundation has been a tremendous…
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.
I spent a whole month researching FreeBSD's kernel's virtual memory system to understand why tools like htop, btop and fastfetch report different information about RAM usage. I ended up submitting patches to all of these projects.
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
When building web services, a common wisdom is to try to reduce the number of HTTP requests to improve performance.
