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Why is this site built with C
Most of what I have written features in the category of notes-to-self. Mostly on how to do A or B.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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Epoll is fundamentally broken
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
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Latency/throughput tradeoffs, illustrated with coffee
You’re making morning drip coffee. You need to make 2 cups. Do you:
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Unix as a tool forge and how Emacs fits in Unix philosophy
Wikipedia cites a few different sources on what “Unix Philosophy” is. Peter Salus summarizes it as:
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
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Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
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Surprising economics of load-balanced systems
I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average. In other words, we increase…
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I.MX7 M4 Atomic Cache Bug
Hardware Bugs can be frustrating, as they are likely the last place you would expect a bug. Unfortunately, they can and do happen. Most likely every CPU has a list of erratas. This post outlines th…
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What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
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The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
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How x86_64 Addresses Memory
Update 2025-03-05 : @jxu has shared a collection of simplified examples that are even easier to follow than the original ones in this post.
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Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
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Durability: NVMe Disks
Durability is the guarantee that data can be accessed after a failure. It seems like this should be very simple: either your system provides durable data storage, or it does not. However, durability is not a binary yes/no property, and instead should be defined as the kinds of failures you want your data to survive…
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Debian Riscv64 port in mid 2019
It's been a while since last post (Talk about the Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port at RISC-V workshop), and sometimes things look very quiet from outside even if the people on the backstage never stop working. So this is an update on the status of this port before the release of buster, which should happen in a few weeks…
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Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years
This week’s paper won the distinguished presentation award at HotOS 2021, and discusses the potential for future innovation in the tool that many use every day - the shell! A previous submission of this paper on Hacker News elicited a number of strong reactions. One reaction was the assertion that there are in fact…
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My fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml
Building httpz, a high-performance HTTP/1.1 parser with zero heap allocation using OxCaml's unboxed types, local allocations, and mutable local variables.
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In Praise of Alpine and APK
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
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Fast CSV Processing with SIMD
I recently learned of csvquote , a tool that encodes troublesome CSV characters such that unix tools can correctly process them. It reverses the encoding at the end of the pipeline, recovering the original input. The original implementation handles CSV quotes using the straightforward, naive method. However, there’s a…
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Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure
> 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...
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Improving Xwayland window resizing
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example