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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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.
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
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This post is the fourth part of a three-part series 1 describing work that I have been doing to improve the Cranelift compiler. In this post, I'll describe the work that went into regalloc2 , a new register allocator I developed over the past year. The allocator started as an effort to port IonMonkey's register…
If LZ compression is compilation , what other instructions are useful to add? I've spent the last several years, off and on, trying to figur...
Mosaic: Processing a trillion-edge graph on a single machine Maass et al., EuroSys’17 Unless your graph is bigger than Facebook’s, you can process it on a single machine. With the incep…
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
Digital audio processing is a complex yet fascinating subject. Getting a deeper understanding requires knowledge in multiple technical disciplines, including physics, electrical/electronical engineering, and some software engineering when it comes to parts of the Linux ecosystem. This article aims to demystify the…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Occasionally I’ve needed to key a hash table with C pointers. I don’t care about the contents of the object itself — especially if it might change — just its pointer identity. For example, suppose I’m using null-terminated strings as keys and I know these strings will always be interned in a common table. These…
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
Published: 18-09-2014 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
Remember that famous hack for approximating y = x −1/2 from Quake III? It goes like this:
Blog about network and security, showing example of Linux iptables and Snort configuration, and Windows security softwares.
AWS EC2 Virtualization 2017: explaining the different virtualization types, from emulation and binary substitution, paravirtualization and Xen, PV, HVM, and PVHVM modes, and the new Nitro hypervisor
This is a post describing my involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V (unofficial and not endorsed by Debian at the moment) and announcing the availability of the repository (still very much WIP) with packages built for this architecture. If not interested in the story but you want to check the…
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array.
Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ . The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet another RiiR). But I found that my implementation is much slower than the original one. Here is how I improve…
A fake-interview scam tried to backdoor my machine with PinpinRAT, hidden in a malicious TypeScript patch. Analysis of the attack, payload, and indicators of compromise.
My brother and I spent a lot of time designing our eBPF security agent to be really fast from the ground up, but recently we discovered we could make it much faster using memoization! A couple of weeks ago, I profiled the eBPF code and found that the most expensive part of the protection isn’t actually enforcing a…
First: performance is tricky and bechmarking even more so. I will talk some numbers in this post but of course they are what I have measured for my specific tests on my machine. Your numbers for your test cases will be different. Over the last six months or so, curl has undergone a number of … Continue reading curl 8…
BeOS browser : TLS apocalypse Won't keep it off line. (How do you pronounce BeOS ?) This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise s...
The Rust programming language has been able to run on bare-metal without the standard library for quite some while now. However, most Rust applications depend on the std crate, and therefore still need a full operating system to run.
Just one instruction at a time!
