2521
OpenBSD and the modern laptop
Did you think that OpenBSD is suitable only for firewalls and high-security servers? Think again. Here are my steps to transform a modern m...
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
2522
How to slow down a program and why it can be useful
Making programs slower can be useful to find...
2523
Everything I've learned building the fastest Arm desktop
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster. I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro. 128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to…
2524
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging It in 30 Minutes with Fray
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…
2525
Building a WireGuard jail with FreeBSD's standard tools
Recently, I had an opportunity to build a WireGuard jail on a FreeBSD 12.1 host. As it was really quick and easy to setup and it has been working completely fine for a month, I’d like to share my experience with anyone interested in this topic. I would like to use WireGuard app on my Android phone to access my home…
2526
SeL4 on RISC-V Verified to Binary Code
… and seL4 and RISC-V Foundations form an alliance In June 2020 we announced that the seL4 microkernel, the world’s first operating system (OS) kernel with a machine-checked proof of implemen…
2527
Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…
2528
Unpacking Elixir: Real-Time and Latency
Elixir was built on Erlang. Erlang was built to provide "consistently low latency" and a few other audacious goals. Note, this is not a hard realtime constraint. It is soft, squishy and yet, important and real. It makes Erlang unusually suitable to systems where latency matters and where a near-realtime experience is…
2529
Trying chDB, an embeddable ClickHouse engine
A lightweight in-process SQL OLAP engine, powered by ClickHouse.
2530
On Disk IO, Part 3: LSM Trees
If you like the series, check out my book on Database Internals!
2531
Write a toy strace and gdb
Being able to peek into a process is a very helpful thing when we want to fully understand how a program behaves.
2532
ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization
It's late 2020 and you just got a brand-new Mac with Apple's own ARM processors. Exciting! But what will development be like?
2533
Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Event on Linux?
This article is dedicated to discussing why it's so hard to detect the 'key up' or 'key release' event in a Linux terminal environment without relying on X server. Several techniques and code examples will be shown that are capable of detecting the keyup event on Linux (with and without an X server), but all…
2534
Bcachefs, an Introduction/Exploration
Introduction & background information NOTE: This content is from an internal talk I gave, thus the reason it may read like a presentation So what is …
2535
Brave New Trusted Boot World
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
2536
What can you do in 2k LOC of C?
It started with stb_image.c because it’s just crazy useful and avoids so much hassle in small demo programs. But that was just the gateway…
2537
2538
Apple has just released the first Rapid Security Response for Ventura
Apple has just released the first of its new Rapid Security Responses (RSRs) for macOS 13.3.1 Ventura. This is indicated as macOS Rapid Security Response 13.3.1 (a), and is just just over 300 MB to…
2539
2540
Graviton 3, Apple M2 and Qualcomm 8cx 3rd gen: a URL parsing benchmark
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance. Of course, no single measure ……
2541
How to allocate memory
Many programmers use malloc() and free() and pay no more mind to "allocating memory", but I often find 2-20× speed improvements by rethinking memory usage, so it is something I usually want to examine when joining a distressed project.
2542
2543
QOA, the Quite OK Audio Format
Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless” , “complicated” or “bad” . After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.
2544
A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
2545
What's the big deal about embedded key-value databases?
What's the big deal about key-value databases like FoundationDB and RocksDB?
2546
Untangling microservices, or balancing complexity in distributed systems
The microservices honeymoon period is over. Uber is refactoring thousands of microservices into a more manageable solution [1]; Kelsey Hightower is predicting monoliths are the future [2]; and even Sam Newman is declaring that microservices should never be the default choice, but rather a last resort [3]. What’s going…
2547
Reality Check for Cloudflare Wasm Workers and Rust
With native Rust support announced for Cloudflare Workers, one may be eager to jump in head first. I know I wanted to. However, I tested out a few use cases and found it too limiting. Either the desired APIs weren’t available, code size was too large, or the program couldn’t run within resource constraints. I remain…
2548
A little bump in the wire that makes the Internet faster
My parents live in a rural area, where the usual monopolist Internet service provider provides the usual monopolist Internet service: DSL, r...
2549
Hotpatching a C Function on x86
In this post I’m going to do a silly, but interesting, exercise that should never be done in any program that actually matters. I’m going write a program that changes one of its function definitions while it’s actively running and using that function. Unlike last time , this won’t involve shared libraries, but it will…
2550