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Completely Silent Computer
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 271 posts.
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The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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Write Your Own Virtual Machine
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
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Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
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JVM Internals (2013)
Explains the internal architecture of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in simple terms using showing key components and how memory is updated during execution.
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
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Logs in High Sierra Show Plaintext Password for APFS Encrypted External Volumes
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST UPATE TO THE UPDATE: Similar log entries are now found in another system log that is more persistent, see the article here . UPDATE: This is still vulnerable on current versions of macOS 10.13.3 when encrypted an ALREADY EXISTING unencrypted APFS volume
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Picking Apart the Crashing iOS String
So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text …
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The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…
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Distributed architecture concepts I learned when building a large payment system
When building a large scale, highly available and distributed system, what architecture concepts do you need to use, in practice? In this post, I am summarizing ones I have found essential to learn and apply when building the payments system that powers Uber. This is a system with a load
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Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?
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Brushing up on operating systems and C programming
If you were like me in college, you first learned about the C programming language in an introductory computer science course. Then, perhaps you took a really hard course in operating systems. Then, y
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Why Create a New Unix Shell?
Please read this update instead: Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) . This page is obsolete!
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Writing an OS in Rust: Hardware Interrupts
In this post, we set up the programmable interrupt controller to correctly forward hardware interrupts to the CPU. To handle these interrupts, we add …
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x86 finds its way into the iPhone
Personal page where to dump sparse knowledge
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The Various Kinds of IO – Blocking, Non-Blocking, Multiplexed and Async
A blog where I write down my thoughts, ideas and notions, as an exercise to cement them in my memory and improve on their concepts.
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How modern Linux systems boot
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Dtrace for Linux
Not explicitly mentioned in that talk, but certainly the most exciting thing, is that Oracle is doing a proper linux kernel port: