Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…
Read THE WEIRD CONCEPT OF BRANCHLESS PROGRAMMING on sanixdk.xyz
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
Don't "let it crash". Let it heal.
View the code on GitHub
Durable execution with just postgres.
This is part 3 of my ongoing series about LATENTRED, my project to create an open source 1U managed Ethernet switch from scratch.
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
A crash course on direct framebuffer and keyboard access via NetBSD’s wscons
I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…
Should I host my blog on here?
Android developer, author of Combian 64 and Dosbian
Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…
In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
Although the title of this article might suggest otherwise, I don’t dislike Unreal’s multiplayer features. As someone who has worked on two different multiplayer games in Unreal, I enjo…
Rene Schallner (@renerocksai): software engineer turned AI researcher and engineer, in Vienna.
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
How Linux kernel, systems and embedded developers can use Perfetto for debugging performance issues.
Most of what I have written features in the category of notes-to-self. Mostly on how to do A or B.
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
While ZFS has a well-earned reputation for data integrity and reliability, OpenZFS native encryption has some incredibly sharp edges that will cut you if you don't know where to be careful. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, standing in a pool of my own blood and tears after thoroughly lacerating myself…
I brag about my newest obsession.
Quick demonstration of using User Mode Linux (UML) to run a Linux VM inside Linux's userspace, without additional VM software or even root permissions
Making programs slower can be useful to find...
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging it in 30 Minutes with Fray I’ve been adding more integration tests for Fray recently. To ensure Fray can handle different scenarios, I wrote many creative test cases. Many of them passed as expected, while some failures led to epic fixes in Fray. Then something…
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
