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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 343 posts.

2020
153

Writing a RISC-V OS in Rust: System Calls

System calls are a way for unprivileged, user applications to request services from the kernel. In the RISC-V architecture, we invoke the call using the ecall instruction. This will cause the CPU to halt what it's doing, elevate privilege modes, and then jump to whatever function handler is stored in the mtvec…

160

Cost of a thread in C++ under Linux

Almost all our computers are made of several processing cores. Thus it can be efficient to "parallelize" expensive processing in a multicore manner. That is, instead of using a single core to do all of the work, you divide the work among multiple cores. A standard way to approach this problem is to create threads. ……

164

Why software ends up complex

Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a user interface, is generally regarded as a vice. And yet complexity is exceptionally common, even though no one ever sets out to build something complex. For people interested in building easy to use software, understanding the causes of…

166

Microservices Considered Harmful (2019)

A recent trend in our industry is the software architecture move from a monolith app to microservices, often with a related blog post explaining how much better everything is after. A recent blog post by neo-bank Monzo explains that they have reached the crazy amount of 1500 microservices (a ratio of ~10 microservices…

175

OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go 2

I used OpenBSD on the original Surface Go back in 2018 and many things worked with the big exception of the internal Atheros WiFi. This meant I had to keep it tethered to a USB-C dock for Ethernet or use a small USB-A WiFi dongle plugged into a less-than-small USB-A-to-USB-C adapter.