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Apache Kafka, Samza, and the Unix Philosophy of Distributed Data
Confluent is building the foundational platform for data in motion so any organization can innovate and win in a digital-first world.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles
My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.
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Why do RET instructions have a REPZ prepended on x86?
Recently, we began work on a binary static analysis tool. While reading some disassembly, we came across a weird-looking instruction, that was present in most everything we gave objdump .
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Nerd Sniped by BINFMT_MISC
How to script in any language thanks to rootless containers and BINFMT_MISC.
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Linux 6.1 on NanoPi R4S – On fixing SD-card support, Heisenbugs and Rabbit Holes
This little ARM64 single-board computer dragged me into the world of device trees, voltage regulators, and one of the worst Heisenbugs I encountered so far.
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PostgreSQL 14 Internals
I’m excited to announce that the translation of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is finally complete thanks to the amazing work of Liudmila Mantrova. The final part of the book considers each of the index types in great detail. It explains and demonstrates how access methods, operator classes, and data types work…
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022
Between 2016 and 2020 I wrote a series of blog posts called “How to speed up the Rust compiler”. These were mostly about my work on the Rust compiler, plus some updates on the progress on the Rust compiler’s speed in general.
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History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned
Apache Storm recently became a top-level project , marking a huge milestone for the project and fo...
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Hypervisor 101 in Rust
This is a day long course to quickly learn the inner working of hypervisors and techniques to write them for high-performance fuzzing.
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Back-end parallelism in the Rust compiler
This post describes some performance work I have been doing recently on rustc. I spent several weeks on a particular problem with only a small amount of success. I hope a write-up will be interesting and educational, and may even lead to suggestions that make things better. The post is aimed at readers with some…
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Why Windows 10 Sucks or Everything Wrong with Microsoft Windows
It's funny and equally sad that year 2015 marks the end of the Windows OS for a lot of people. There are several issues with Windows which, at present, make Spyware/ Malware OS 10 inappropriate and even outright dangerous for a lot of people. The most egregious, of course, is a total abandonment of any form of privacy…
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It used to be simpler to teach Unix
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...
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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
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Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'. I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box…
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macOS extensions are moving away from the kernel
Management of kernel extensions has changed significantly in Big Sur and later. This overview for users contrasts kexts with user-level extensions which are replacing them.
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From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey
Upgraded to WiFi 7 expecting 1.7 Gbps speeds. Got 400 Mbps instead. Here's what was actually wrong and how I fixed it.
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WebContainers are now supported in Firefox on desktop and Android
WebContainers are now supported on Firefox for desktop and mobile as a result of StackBlitz and Mozilla collaboration! 🥳
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A shared file system for lambda functions
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…
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Pictures of a working garbage collector
C++, a "Reality sandwich", and an Octopus.
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Load is not what you should balance: Introducing Prequal
Bartek Wydrowski, Google Research; Robert Kleinberg, Google Research and Cornell; Stephen M. Rumble, Google (YouTube); Aaron Archer, Google Research
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Let's discuss sandbox isolation
A dive into the spectrum of sandboxing and isolation, from Linux namespaces and gVisor to hardware-enforced microVMs and WebAssembly, and why picking the right boundary matters for multi-tenant workloads.
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Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
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Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
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Accelerate large-scale applications with BOLT
Highly complex services, such as those here at Facebook, have large source code bases in order to deliver a wide range of features and functionality. Even after the machine code for one of these se…