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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
How APFS, the boot volume group, hashes, and Secure Boot all combine to guarantee the integrity of your system, and save you trouble and work.
The first version of LibreSSL portable, 2.0.0, was released a few days ago (followed soon after by 2.0.1 ). Despite the 2.0.x version numbers, these are only preview releases and shouldn't be used in production yet, but have been released to solicit testing and feedback. After testing and examining the codebase, my…
It has been almost 9 months since I started my sabbatical work with the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB team. I knew what I signed up for then...
Audio on Unix is a little zoo, there are so many acronyms for projects and APIs that it's easy to get lost. Let's tackle that issue! Most articles are confusing because they either use audio technical jargon, or because they barely scratch the surface and leave people clueless. A little knowledge can be dangerous.
Five years ago Debian and most derivatives switched from the standard GNU C Library (GLIBC) to the Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC). Debian is now about to...
Before ‘cyber’ was a prefix for everything internet and computers, it was how mathematicians were going to conquer the world.
Simplevisor : SimpleVisor is a simple, portable, Intel VT-x hypervisor with two specific goals: using the least amount of assembly code (10 lines), and having the smallest amount of VMX-related code to support dynamic hyperjacking and unhyperjacking (that is, virtualizing the host state from within the host). It runs…
With the Meltdown and Spectre fiascos , performance isn't a very hot topic at the moment. In fact, with Linux v4.15 released, it is one ...
Windows has long had a reputation for slow file operations and slow process creation. Have you ever wanted to make these operations even slower? This weeks’ blog post covers a technique you can use…
Back in the old days, I could just type route (or, later, ip route) in my Linux terminal and get an accurate picture of all my routes. This is no longer the case.
Developers running their apps on tsuru can choose plans based on memory and cpu usage. We were looking at adding I/O usage as one of the plan’s features, so one could choose how many I/O operations per second or bytes per second a container may be able to read/write. Being able to limit I/O is particulary important…
I’m Sérgio, and I work with Web frontend code. Sometimes I write about it here.
A bug, most probably in the early part of kernel boot in guest macOS, prevents M4 Macs virtualising macOS prior to 13.4.
Databases are fabulous resources. Of course, we’ll abuse them in ways that cause challenges.
When making a first full backup of less than 2 GB takes 86 minutes, and you then can’t restore from it anyway.
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
tl;dr “Transparent Hugepages” is a Linux kernel feature intended to improve performance by making more efficient use of your processor’s memory-mapping hardware. It is enabled ("enabled=always") by default in most Linux distributions. Transparent Hugepages gives some applications a small performance improvement (~ 10%…
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
The time has come to replace file systems!
Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general Linux systems was very…
