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An introduction to virtual memory
...and the crucial role it plays in modern operating systems.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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Writing an OS in Rust: Testing
This post explores unit and integration testing in no_std executables. We will use Rust’s support for custom test frameworks to execute test functions…
2194
Broken by design: systemd
Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various communities in which I'm involved, including the musl IRC channel and on the Busybox mailing list .
2195
The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008)
Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages.
2196
A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs
The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…
2197
You can list a directory containing 8M files, but not with ls
I needed to list all files in a directory, but ls , find , and os.listdir all hung. This is my story.
2198
The end of TenFourFox and what I've learned from it
Now that I have your attention. I've been mulling TenFourFox's future for awhile now in light of certain feature needs that are far bigger ...
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Size cost of C++ exception handling on embedded platforms
Introduction There is a common stereotype, that C++ exception handling code will significantly increase binary image size ("up to 100kb")...
2203
Optimizing a WebGPU Matmul Kernel for 1 TFLOP
Building Surfgrad, a high-performant, WebGPU-powered autograd library
2204
curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd
How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
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The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
2208
Quick Look at Rosetta on Linux
Yesterday, Apple did release RosettaLinux as part of the macOS Ventura preview. Let’s take a first quick look…
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Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2210
Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs
The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…
2211
How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
2212
Hardware hotplug events on Linux, the gory details
Maybe the code shouldn't be the only documentation?
2213
The macOS Sandbox File Limit
There has recently been some renewed discussion on Twitter about the limitation that the macOS sandbox places on the number of open files an app can access at once. Apps are still running into problems because of this limitation, and there is not a lot of technical detail available on it outside of Apple, so I’d like…
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The M2 is more advanced than it seemed
Apple’s M2 chip uses a newer version of the CPU core instruction set. This increases its capability, thus how well it will cope with future apps and macOS, compared with the M1.
2216
HiveNightmare a.k.a. SeriousSAM – anybody can read the registry in Windows 10
This is the story of how all non-admin users can read the registry — and so elevate privileges and access sensitive credential information…
2217
Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018)
I’ve gone through many iterations of a Home NAS over the years. It started with an AMD Phenom based system running in a Norco case with about 8 hard SATA hard drives (4 primary, 4 backup via Rsync). The noise and power consumption of that system was overkill for what it was used for, so I sold it and went to a…
2218
What the hell is a target triple?
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
2219
State of multi-player Wayland
I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!
2220
Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await
Musings about async await again and why I think virtual threads