Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
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.
Recently I came across Lunduke post about some mysterious Vendefoul Wolf Linux distribution that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan as base (no systemd(1) here) and XLibre X11 server along with IceWM wind…
Type systems verify properties of programs. Production correctness is a property of systems. The gap between these is where the interesting failures live.
Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher speeds. These two versions of…
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he…
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec. Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagat...
Lots of the CVE world seems to focus on “security bugs” but I’ve found that it is not all that well known exactly how the Linux kernel security process works. I gave a talk about this back in 2023 and at other conferences since then, attempting to explain how it works, but I also thought it would be good to explain…
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
A blog about software craft and quality
My personal website and blog
Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
what's a few systemd services in initramfs between friends?
Karpathy recently posted about using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases — collecting raw sources into a directory, having an LLM “compile” them into a wiki of interlinked markdown …
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse.
From DrvFs in WSL 1 to Plan 9 to virtiofs, cross-OS file access in WSL 2 has improved with each generation. A new change gives each virtio device its own dedicated DMA pool, removing the last major contention point on the virtiofs path.
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
I’m Sérgio, and I work with Web frontend code. Sometimes I write about it here.
I never understood how traceroute discovers each hop. Turns out it's a clever TTL trick, and about 80 lines of Rust.
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
asawicki.info is protected against automated traffic and abuse. This one-time check confirms you are a real visitor — nothing to install.
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
A dive into the spectrum of sandboxing and isolation, from Linux namespaces and gVisor to hardware-enforced microVMs and WebAssembly, and why picking the right boundary matters for multi-tenant workloads.
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here , or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply .
How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
