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Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation
If your company uses Kubernetes, you are likely expending energy on something that doesn't take you towards your mission.
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
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Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt. If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1. I reported this issue privately…
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So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
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Why I love FreeBSD
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
As of today, I've been using the same Arch Linux installation for ten years on my main computer. I don't have much to say, but I'm writing this because my experience doesn't match the common notion that Arch Linux is unstable. 1
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Ground control to Major Trial
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.
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The most remarkable legacy system I have seen
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a bank sometime back. This could be summarized as an internal AWS lambda equivalent. The offering was complete with full CI, CD, unit te…
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How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?
I use a hardware latency tester to measure how much the VTE-based terminals improved from GNOME 45 to GNOME 46.
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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Death by a Thousand Microservices
The software industry is learning once again that complexity kills
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JVM Internals (2013)
Explains the internal architecture of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in simple terms using showing key components and how memory is updated during execution.
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How does apt render its fancy progress bar?
Python Developer and Trainer
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part III
After a few weeks of investigating the Apple M1 GPU in January, I was able to draw a triangle with my own open source code . Although I began dissecting the instruction set, the shaders there were specified as machine code. A real graphics driver needs a compiler from high-level shading languages (GLSL or Metal) to a…
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Pi Durable
Pi Durable is a new experimental package for long-running, durable, and malleable agents that can run anywhere. A tour of what we built and why.
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How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
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The Prime Video microservices to monolith story
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
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You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings
How to gain access to the contents of privacy-protected folders even though Privacy & Security settings say that access is denied.
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Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
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Making a Go program faster with a one-character change
Harry Marr — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Co-founded Dependabot, previously at GitHub, Monzo, and GoCardless.