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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.
Recently, we began work on a binary static analysis tool. While reading some disassembly, we came across a weird-looking instruction, that was present in most everything we gave objdump .
How to script in any language thanks to rootless containers and BINFMT_MISC.
This little ARM64 single-board computer dragged me into the world of device trees, voltage regulators, and one of the worst Heisenbugs I encountered so far.
Between 2016 and 2020 I wrote a series of blog posts called “How to speed up the Rust compiler”. These were mostly about my work on the Rust compiler, plus some updates on the progress on the Rust compiler’s speed in general.
Apache Storm recently became a top-level project , marking a huge milestone for the project and fo...
This is a day long course to quickly learn the inner working of hypervisors and techniques to write them for high-performance fuzzing.
This post describes some performance work I have been doing recently on rustc. I spent several weeks on a particular problem with only a small amount of success. I hope a write-up will be interesting and educational, and may even lead to suggestions that make things better. The post is aimed at readers with some…
It's funny and equally sad that year 2015 marks the end of the Windows OS for a lot of people. There are several issues with Windows which, at present, make Spyware/ Malware OS 10 inappropriate and even outright dangerous for a lot of people. The most egregious, of course, is a total abandonment of any form of privacy…
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'. I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box…
Management of kernel extensions has changed significantly in Big Sur and later. This overview for users contrasts kexts with user-level extensions which are replacing them.
Upgraded to WiFi 7 expecting 1.7 Gbps speeds. Got 400 Mbps instead. Here's what was actually wrong and how I fixed it.
C++, a "Reality sandwich", and an Octopus.
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.
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
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 .
