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Upgrading a Toshiba NAS HDD Firmware on Linux
I reversed the firmware updater of my Toshiba HDD to be able to update it on Linux. The following commands should work, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK :
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.
332
VPR: Nordic's First RISC-V Processor
VPR (pronounced “Viper”) is Nordic Semiconductor’s first RISC-V processor, landing in the new nRF54H and nRF54L lines of SoCs after their initial announcements in April and October of 2023 respectively. Readers of this blog are familiar with my long-running obsession interest in RISC-V (see my RISC-V Tips and RISC-V…
333
Some OpenBSD features that aren't widely known
In this article, you will learn about some OpenBSD features you may not know about
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We sped up time series by 20-30x
This is a follow up post that dives into how we managed to achieve such huge performance gains for time series (among other things), and why it was so hard in the first place.
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Clojure: Managing throughput with virtual threads
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
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Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3" TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.
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Optimizing the Ion compiler back end
In September, machine learning engineers at Mozilla filed a bug report indicating that Firefox was consuming excessive memory and CPU resources while running Microsoft’s ONNX Runtime (a machine learning library) compiled to WebAssembly.
338
Making my first embedded Linux system
End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.
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Improving cursor rendering on Wayland
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
340
Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Protocol Firehose by >99%
Jetstream is a streaming service that consumes an AT Proto Sync Firehose and converts it into lightweight, filterable, friendly JSON, allowing us to live tail all posts on Bluesky for as little as ~850 MB/day
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Linux ext2 filesystem driver now marked as deprecated
31 years after the start of its career in 1993, it’s time for ext2 to retire. Here we are talking about the driver for this filesystem, not exactly the filesystem itself. Continue reading to understand the subtle difference.
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FreeBSD 13.4-Release
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/13 branch.
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Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
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Improving Network Performance with Linux Flowtables
We’re building an open source alternative to AWS. For IPv4 assignment and firewall rules, we use Linux’s Netfilter / Nftables. This subsystem provides a powerful way to handle packets addressed to the host. We recently came across flowtables - a network acceleration feature in the Linux kernel that works like a…
347
What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
348
The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
349
Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
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GPU synchronization in Godot 4.3 is getting a major upgrade
Say goodbye to placing barriers, hello to the new acyclic graph
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Improving Xwayland window resizing
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example
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The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
Long thought impossible, helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for high-capacity HDDs. This is the story the science behind them.
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Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?
Asynchronous IO (also known as "non-blocking IO") is a technique applications use to allow performing of many IO operations without blocking the calling OS thread, and without needing to spawn many threads (i.e. one thread per operation). In the late 1990s/early 2000s, an increasing amount of people using the internet…
355
When "letting it crash" is not enough
This essay explores the connection between Erlang's process supervision, state management and durable execution.
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Bcachefs, an Introduction/Exploration
Introduction & background information NOTE: This content is from an internal talk I gave, thus the reason it may read like a presentation So what is …
357
A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
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There are only 12 binaries in Talos Linux
Updated October 2025 to reflect the growth in binaries from 12 to <50.
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Baby’s Second Garbage Collector
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
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The Linux audio stack demystified (and more)
Digital audio processing is a complex yet fascinating subject. Getting a deeper understanding requires knowledge in multiple technical disciplines, including physics, electrical/electronical engineering, and some software engineering when it comes to parts of the Linux ecosystem. This article aims to demystify the…