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SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful (2017)
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We de…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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AVX512 VBMI – remove spaces from text
Removing spaces from a string is a common task in text processing. Instead of removing single character we often want to remove all the white space characters or the punctuation characters etc.
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Proxmox VE 6.1 – Open-Source virtualization platform
Latest announcements for Proxmox.
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Building a “Simple” Distributed System – Formal Verification
In the last post , we described a protocol that should satisfy the requirements and invariants established in the first post . Today we will look at formal verification with TLA+. Formal verification is just another (niche) tool in the toolbox. Some tools require more skill than others to use. So
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10 Years SeL4: Still the Best, Still Getting Better
A week ago, on 29 July, we at Trustworthy Systems celebrated seL4 Freedom Day, the 5th anniversary of the open-sourcing of seL4. Furthermore it was seL4’s 10th birthday – the annive…
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NVMM: A full, fast and flexible virtualization stack for NetBSD
NVMM provides the infrastructure needed for both the kernel driver and the userland emulators.
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OpenMandriva, the first Clang-built Linux distribution
OpenMandriva Lx is a unique and independent distribution and direct descendant of Mandriva Linux
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Finding Kafka’s throughput limit in Dropbox infrastructure
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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Faster, cheaper, and better: A story of breaking a monolith
On May 21st 2019, we broke search service out of vehicle-service. It was faster, cheaper, and better!
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Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-Pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs
I’m pleased to report that Hyperscan, the regular expression matcher that ate my life from 2008 through 2018, finally has a paper (pdf) – it’s being presented this week at NSDI &#…
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Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
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A Gentle Introduction to Multithreading
Approaching the world of concurrency, one step at a time.
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Using TLA+ to Understand Xen Vchan
The vchan protocol is used to stream data between virtual machines on a Xen host without needing any locks. It is largely undocumented. The TLA …
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The Configuration Complexity Curse
Why managing configuration has become so complex and how data configuration languages like CUE offer a path forward.
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Building columnar compression in a row-oriented database
Read how we built a flexible, high-performance columnar compression mechanism for PostgreSQL to add scalability to our favorite database.
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What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful
Addendum: I've added a few additional tips for conference papers chairs, papers committee members, and papers sorters .
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Async.h – asynchronous, stackless subroutines in C
The async/await idiom is becoming increasingly popular. The first widely used language to include it was C#, and it has now spread into Jav...
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HermiTux: A Binary-Compatible Unikernel
A binary-compatible unikernel
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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
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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.
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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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Beating C with 70 lines of Go
Writing a faster wc utility in Go