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Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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The CAP theorem of Clustering: Why Every Algorithm Must Sacrifice Something
No clustering algorithm is perfect and you must make a trade-off.
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Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux
I don’t want to post yet another anti-systemd rant, but I think the ubiquity of systemd could eventually create real problems for embedded Linux. I just wish I knew what to do about it.
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Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)
Shopislot adalah situs game online yang menghadirkan berbagai pilihan permainan slot dengan tampilan 3D yang tajam dan detail. Nikmati pengalaman bermain yang lebih menarik dengan visual realistis, navigasi sederhana, serta koleksi game yang lengkap dalam satu platform.
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Writing GUI applications on the Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment (2019)
In a previous article, I explained how I set up a TFT LCD screen on my Raspberry Pi. Because I had been previously using my Pi as a headless server, I hadn’t installed a desktop environment. I wanted to add a lightweight heads-up display to the server, and I wanted a graphical application that could operate without X…
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Linux's Bedtime Routine
How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.
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Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite
The personal website of JT Archie. Includes a blog, work ethic, and projects they have worked on.
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A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4
I bought a Surface Pro 4 in 2016. It has an Intel Core m3-6Y30 CPU and 4GB memory. The spec is not that impressive even compared to an average laptop released years earlier. On the other hand, the form factor is very attractive to me: at a very low price, you get a tablet with a beautiful HiDPI 2k screen, a pressure…
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Optimizing Postgres table layout for maximum efficiency
Introduction When modeling a Postgres database, you probably don’t give much thought to the order of columns in your tables. After all, it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t affect storage or performance. But what if I told you that simply reordering your columns could reduce the size of your tables and…
161
Investigating a vanishing BIOS on the Fujitsu Lifebook AH532
A few months ago, I got given a laptop with a very interesting condition. The BIOS setup menu was supposedly inaccessible, and nothing apart from the default boot option works. Time to investigate to see what is actually happening and what we can do about it.
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3600 MHz Raspberry Pi 5 with Liquid Nitrogen
I tried everything but couldn’t turn this Raspberry Pi 5 into the World’s Fastest Pi 5. Unfortunately, we can’t quite claim that title.
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Properly testing concurrent data structures
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…
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Demystifying Debuggers, Part 2: The Anatomy of a Running Program
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?
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A Pipeline Made of Airbags
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.
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Learning about distributed systems: where to start? (2020)
This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distrib...
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Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
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Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%. This goal will be achieved through a high-level design overhaul…
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The RAM Myth
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
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Linux Network Performance Ultimate Guide
https://blog.packagecloud.io/illustrated-guide-monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/
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Beating the Compiler
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
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Traceroute Isn't Real
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
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The search for easier safe systems programming
I've been involved in the Rust project in some form or another since 2016, and it's a language I'm very comfortable using. Many Rust programmers could say the same . But, if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we'd admit that the road to getting to that level of comfort was difficult.
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XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta
This is one of several papers I’ll be reading from 2023’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). If you’d like to receive regular updates as soon as they’re published, check out my newsletter or follow me on the site formerly known as Twitter . Enjoy!
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SPI Flash
SPI Flash reader built from a Teensy or Arduino
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Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux
I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targetin…
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Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud
A thought experiment on the winners, losers and new players in a cloud-driven stock, fx and commodity-trading world
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Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
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Virtualizing the 6502 on a 6502 with 6o6
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two d...