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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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.
Here is my test file tree. There are two files and a "src" subdirectory, where another two files are stored:
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of ...
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
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.
Using linked lists to optimize performance in a JSON schema validator.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
In distributed systems, there’s a common understanding that it is not possible to guarantee exactly-once delivery of messages. What is possible though is exactly-once processing. By adding a unique …
I am generally a fan of Go's approach to concurrency: writing code with goroutines is a lot easier than writing traditional nonblocking network servers in a language like C or C++. However, while working on a highly concurrent network proxy I came across an interesting realization about how the Go concurrency model…
Some of you may know I've been spending whatever time I can scrounge together grinding away at a new serialization library for .NET. Serializers can be complicated beasts. They have to be reliable, flexible, and fast beyond reproach. I won't convince you that serialization libraries have to be quick — in this post…
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…
Lately I’ve been thinking about Stephan Berger’s recent blog post on hiding Linux processes with bind mounts. Bottom line here is that if you have an evil process you want to hide, use …
Now they’ve gone an done it. An unidentified agency has spread a potent computer virus across all the world’s computers and deleted the binaries for every copy of every software development tool. Even the offline copies — it’s that potent.
This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here's what it shows:
Why TOAST is the best thing since sliced bread
CUDA grep : Manish and Brandon's 15418 final project
A few weeks ago I criticized a proposal by Antirez for a hypothetical linearizable system built on top of Redis WAIT and a strong coordinator. I showed that the coordinator he suggested was physically impossible to build, and that anybody who tried to actually implement that design would run into serious problems. I…
As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic. If you don’t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost. Thanks.
I am lucky in that I have a few side projects which have grown up to become full fledged companies. One of them builds little tools to detect different types of financial crime.
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmente...
In this article I share the results of a home-lab experiment in which I threw some different problems at ZFS, Btrfs and mdadm+dm-integrity in a RAID-5 setup.
If you’ve spent any amount of time at a Unix command line you’ve probably already seen xargs . In case you haven’t, xargs is a command used to execute commands based on arguments from standard input.
Wettbewerb um die ultimative Mindestanforderung für Windows XP zu finden.
