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FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
Prototyping a Home NAS with RAID1 on FreeBSD on a virtual machine: system installation via SSH with bsdinstall, configuring ZFS mirror and working with datasets
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
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Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
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Benchmark in Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
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Full Reverse Engineering of the TI-84 Plus Operating System
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
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WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
OpenSSL sucks. The BoringSSL and AWS-LC forks are Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases. I can't remember ever having a good experience with software using GnuTLS. LibreSSL is incomplete... FOREWARD This post is about the experience of taking a leap of …
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Alice is impatient
Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s.
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ECC and DDR5
Hamming Codes ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit e…
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Faster Than Dijkstra?
Does a new algorithm that improves on Dijkstra'a classic one actually deliver a practical benefit for networking?
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PC Engine CPU
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Linux on the Sega 32X. Who needs hardware synchronization primitives anyway?
How wanting more is not always better
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Microsoft Needs Windows Lite
Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They're switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.
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cp: -r or -R?
A question like this recently came up again. I once tried to find an answer, but only posted it in some "forum" a decade ago, and I think it's worth saving this little bit of trivia from digital nirvana.
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150 MB Minimal FreeBSD Installation
Sometimes an article starts with a simple question or a single message on one of the available social platforms. This is the case today with this article where @ooberober asked: How small can the r…
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Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10
fresh OI install, clean slate, let's see how well the updated OI Sun Ray support works
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Job queues are deceptively tricky
A worked out example of different job queueing semantics and how they affect workloads.
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Boot Naked Linux
When I was a kid , computers weren’t coddled and left running 24/7, when you were done with them you switched them off, and when you wanted them again you just switched them on and within a second or so they’d be loading whatever was in their disk drive.
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macOS 27 does not support CoreStorage volumes
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
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Benchmarking 15 “E-Waste” GPUs with Modern Workloads
Decommissioned enterprise tesla GPUs are widely available and extremely cheap. In this post, I benchmark tesla GPUs to see if they are useful
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Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD
Behold: the Guru of GNU ! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) True enlightment only comes from a truly free computi...
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Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
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Linux 7.0 Broke PostgreSQL: The Preemption Regression Explained
Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.
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Algorithms on billion-scale graph using 10GB RAM: I love DataFusion
In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a working implementation of basic graph algorithms, such as WCC, PageRank and MSSP. For example, I can identify weakly…
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Your code is fast if you're lucky
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
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Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
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Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
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Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic
Most linux software just work on FreeBSD
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Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
Back in November last year, I started a new job at Intercom, and one of the first projects I got to work on was improving the Intercom monolith CI with some of my new colleagues.