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Emulator basics: a stack and register machine
Writing an x86 emulator from scratch in JavaScript: 1. a stack and register machine
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
2822
FreeBSD – A lesson in poor defaults
This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
2823
AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
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AMD ROCm: A Wasted Opportunity
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
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Classes vs. structs in .NET: how not to teach about performance
It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I believe it’s better to post late than never, so here I am!
2827
Build the Modular Monolith First
Even talking about building a monolith today, is a bit taboo. It is all about microservices at the moment, and has been for a few years. But they aren’t a silver bullet…
2828
The surprising cleverness of modern compilers
I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code: #include <stdint.h> int count(uint64_t x) { int v = 0; while(x != 0) { x &= x - 1; v++; } return v; } Can you guess? popcntq %rdi, %rax That is right. A fairly sophisticated C function, … Continue reading The surprising cleverness…
2829
Xfinity Stream on Linux: A Tale of Widevine, ChromeOS, and a patched Glibc
If your household uses Xfinity for cable, you have almost definitely heard of Xfinity Stream at some point. If you haven’t, Xfinity Stream is a service that allows you to access Xfinity’s on-demand TV over the internet. This can be useful if you want to watch something on Xfinity’s on-demand TV but do not want to go…
2830
No, QuestDB is not Faster than ClickHouse
telegra.ph/no-questdb-is-not-faster-than-clickhouse-06-152022144 points63 commentscited by 3 details
QuestDB created a minor stir in the small but active world of analytics database benchmarking with this blog article: https://questdb.io/blog/2022/05/26/query-benchmark-questdb-versus-clickhouse-timescale. This is the money quote: “QuestDB is an order of magnitude faster than both TimescaleDB and ClickHouse in this…
2831
Why is .NET reflection slow?
It’s common knowledge that reflection in .NET is slow, but why is that the case? This post aims to figure that out by looking at what reflection does under-the-hood.
2832
You could have invented futexes
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
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Reproducing the AWS Outage Race Condition with a Model Checker
Welcome to Waqas' blog
2836
Writing a scheduler for Linux in Rust that runs in user-space
Overview I’ve decided to start a series of blog posts to cover some details about scx_rustland , my little Linux scheduler written in Rust ...
2837
Bitcoin mining the hard way: the algorithms, protocols, and bytes
This article explains Bitcoin mining in details, right down to the hex data and network traffic. If you've ever wondered what really happe...
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Fun with Shellshock
This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
2841
An interactive guide to x86-64 assembly – moving data
This is the second part of a series of interactive articles on the x86-64 architecture. This part will focus on the first assembly instructions, visualizing the way data moves in memory when they are executed.
2842
Jails on FreeBSD
We have had Jails on FreeBSD since 4.0 came out 19 years ago in March 2000. This describes how to setup jails on FreeBSD 12 without any helpers.
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Let’s stop copying C (2016)
Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of…
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WebGPU computations performance in comparison to WebGL
WebGPU – the successor of WebGL, a brand new API to utilize GPUs in the browser. It is promised to be available in regular Chrome in Q1 2022. In comparison to WebGL, WebGPU promises better performance and better compatibility with modern hardware, but the most recognizable feature of WebGPU is a special API for…
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Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Running ASP.NET vNext on OS X and Linux
So what is ASP.NET vNext ? Microsoft have recently released a preview of the next iteration of their ASP.NET platform. I’m not going to go into …