151
Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
152
153
154
Fast machines, slow machines
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that…
155
Writing an OS in Rust: Introduction to Paging
This post introduces paging, a very common memory management scheme that we will also use for our operating system. It explains why memory isolation i…
156
157
Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the…
158
Elementary OS
I’m not one prone to knee-jerk reactions, but I’m also not one to sit about idly without considering alternatives. So the first thing I did after the Apple ...
159
Resolving an unusual WiFi issue
Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.
160
Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
About a month ago I moved to Stockholm, Sweden and started working at Spotify . A month before starting I was asked about my preferred setup for working. Having used OS X for year as the primary operating system at work the choice was clear, I wanted to go back to Linux, in this case to Debian to be exact.
161
162
Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
163
Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language
Writing assembly language is something best left for the experts. To write code that runs directly on your microprocessor you need to know how memory segmentation works, what the intended use of each register is, how codes executes in real and protected modes and much, much more. And, of course, modern compilers will…
164
In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers 1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed…
165
The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
Last November I went to an IETF meeting for the first time. The IETF is an interesting place; it seems to be about 1/3 maintenance grunt wo...
166
What Is a Harness?
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
167
168
Computer latency: 1977-2017
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
169
macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
170
Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/S: How I Learned to Love Tail Calls in C
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
171
Make LLVM Fast Again
Clang is an “LLVM native” C/C++/Objective-C compiler, which aims to deliver amazingly fast compiles […]
172
173
Why xor eax, eax?
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
174
Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i…
175
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II
Less than a month ago, I began investigating the Apple M1 GPU in hopes of developing a free and open-source driver. This week, I’ve reached a second milestone: drawing a triangle with my own open-source code. The vertex and fragment shaders are handwritten in machine code, and I interface with the hardware via the…
176
Inserting a billion rows in SQLite under a minute
This is a chronicle of my experiment where I set out to insert 1B rows in SQLite
177
Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer
One day a coworker mentioned that he was thinking about APIs for distributed compute clusters and I jokingly responded “clearly the ideal API would be simply calling telefork() and your process wakes up on every machine of the cluster with the return value being the instance ID”. I ended up captivated by this idea: I…
178
Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
179
180
Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically
This is Part 1 of a series of posts. Part 2 is available here: Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically It is well-known that writing a good VM for a dynamic language is never an easy job. High