1
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
After over two decades, players are now forbidden from flying a seaplane, all thanks to undefined code behavior.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
2
I use zip bombs to protect my server
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
3
Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
4
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.
5
Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
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Jemalloc Postmortem
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
7
When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
8
I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
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I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
...so the malware would finally shut up and run
10
Why fastDOOM is fast
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
11
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
So I was uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual. It was going slowly, so I opened up the Trackers tab in qBittorrent and saw the following:
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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
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Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii.
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Hard numbers in the Wayland vs. X11 input latency discussion
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
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macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
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Why xor eax, eax?
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
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Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia
On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between anothe…
19
Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
20
Ground control to Major Trial
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.
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Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
22
Boring tech is mature, not old
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
23
Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
24
Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
25
Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers
How difficult could it really be?
26
3,200% CPU Utilization
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
27
Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
A deep dive into Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel architecture, tracing its evolution from Mach and BSD roots to powering macOS, iOS, and Apple Silicon. This post explores the hybrid kernel’s design, its adaptation to new hardware and security paradigms, and why XNU remains a uniquely resilient and scalable foundation…
28
The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
A detailed walkthrough of the Linux boot process from power button to kernel initialization
29
There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
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Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.