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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 533 posts.
v1.2 - added comments from HN v1.3 - added “What does fits mean ?” v1.4 - added the conclusion When something very basic goes wrong, I have this hierarchy of potential culprits: the compiler buggy hardware OS vendor last and least me, because I don’t make mistakes :) So what...
WebGPU is a new graphics and compute API designed on the grounds of W3C organization (mostly) by the browser vendors. It’s designed for the Web, used by Java...
Here's an in-depth recap of debugging a GitLab issue that culminated in a patch for the Linux kernel.
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech…
6-5-0-who? The 6502 is an iconic processor that dominated home computing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was used in machines ra...
An in-depth Look at OCaml’s new "Best-fit" Garbage Collector Strategy The Garbage Collector probably is OCaml’s greatest unsung hero. Its pragmatic approach allows us to allocate without much fear of efficiency loss. In a way, the fact that most OCaml hackers know little about it is a good sign:...
Theo Julienne is a software & infrastructure engineer.
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
At Mozilla, we want the web to be capable of running high-performance applications so that users and content authors can choose the safety, agency, and openness of the web platform. ...
FPGAs can be seen as a bridge between the domains of hardware and software as their hardware operation can be reprogrammed using code, giving developers unprecedented flexibility. In advanced products that Antmicro helps its customers build, this flexibility to process parallel data often needs to be complemented with…
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
July 1, 2020: Post updated to take care that Amazon EFS increased file system minimum throughput, when burst credits are exhausted, to 1 MiB/s. I am very happy to announce that AWS Lambda functions can now mount an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), a scalable and elastic NFS file system storing data within and…
...and the crucial role it plays in modern operating systems.
Scylla is a distributed wide-column 1 database which originated as a C++ port of Cassandra, aiming for improved performance. It supports both Cassandra- and DynamoDB -compatible APIs, and is intended for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, including analytics, messaging, and other time-series data.
This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.
Project Loom is one of the major “projects” in which Java is moved forward, alongside the perhaps better known projects Amber and Valhalla. It will bring “virtual” threads with low resource footprint and low cost of blocking to the Java plaform. Here is my annual advent season update, this time with a focus on…
How SIMD instructions make aggregations faster in QuestDB, including benchmark results and a comparison with Postgres.
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
Video lectureMutator, Allocator, CollectorMemory blockAllocator interfaceMemory alignmentMemory mappingFreeing the objectsBlocks reuseFirst-fit searchAssignmentsNext-fit searchBest-fit searchBlocks splittingBlocks coalescingExplicit Free-listSegregated-list searchOptimizing the storageCustom sbrkConclusion This is the…
by Andrey Norkin, Joel Sole, Mariana Afonso, Kyle Swanson, Agata Opalach, Anush Moorthy, Anne Aaron
26 April 2018 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 10 June 2021You may call them guidelines, heuristics, or rules of thumb. No matter, the purpose is the same: to provide a reasonable approximation of the truth. These rules of thumb can help guide your understanding of the systems you work on, focus you toward the ……
Back with a post after 6 years of silence. If you had to parse a microsecond-resolution epoch timestamp as quickly as possible, how would you do it? We’ll take a look at using compiler intrinsics to do it in log(n) time.
APFS adds 6 volume roles, including one which supports Time Machine backups. And per-file encryption is coming.
Glommio (pronounced glom-io or |glomjəʊ|) is a cooperative thread-per-core crate for Rust & Linux based on io_uring. It allows you to write asynchronous code that takes advantage of rust async/await, but it doesn’t use helper threads anywhere.
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
