331
Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi
Android developer, author of Combian 64 and Dosbian
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
332
A brief look at FreeBSD
Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…
333
Heartbeats in Distributed Systems
In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…
334
A production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
335
Deleting multiplayer from the Unreal engine can save memory
Although the title of this article might suggest otherwise, I don’t dislike Unreal’s multiplayer features. As someone who has worked on two different multiplayer games in Unreal, I enjo…
336
Building a high-performance ticketing system with TigerBeetle
Rene Schallner (@renerocksai): software engineer turned AI researcher and engineer, in Vienna.
337
The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
338
Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
339
Build durable workflows with Postgres
In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into why we chose to build DBOS durable workflow execution on the PostgreSQL DBMS.
340
Perfetto: Swiss army knife for Linux client tracing
How Linux kernel, systems and embedded developers can use Perfetto for debugging performance issues.
341
Why is this site built with C
Most of what I have written features in the category of notes-to-self. Mostly on how to do A or B.
342
How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs
By: Cheng Xie, Bryan Shultz, and Christine Xu
343
HTAP is Dead
Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data + AI Platform.
344
Building the largest known Kubernetes cluster
Learn about the architectural innovations we used to build a 130,000-node Kubernetes cluster, and the trends driving demand for these environments.
345
Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
346
Mind the encryptionroot: How to save your data when ZFS loses its mind
While ZFS has a well-earned reputation for data integrity and reliability, OpenZFS native encryption has some incredibly sharp edges that will cut you if you don't know where to be careful. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, standing in a pool of my own blood and tears after thoroughly lacerating myself…
347
PythonBPF – Writing eBPF Programs in Pure Python
I brag about my newest obsession.
348
Linux VM without VM software – User Mode Linux
Quick demonstration of using User Mode Linux (UML) to run a Linux VM inside Linux's userspace, without additional VM software or even root permissions
349
How to slow down a program and why it can be useful
Making programs slower can be useful to find...
350
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging It in 30 Minutes with Fray
Discovering a JDK Race Condition, and Debugging it in 30 Minutes with Fray I’ve been adding more integration tests for Fray recently. To ensure Fray can handle different scenarios, I wrote many creative test cases. Many of them passed as expected, while some failures led to epic fixes in Fray. Then something…
351
Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots
How targeted improvements helped us speed up bulk data loads and complex schemas.
352
Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
353
Go is portable, until it isn't
An exploration of Go's portability limits when integrating with system-specific C libraries like libsystemd and dealing with glibc vs. musl systems.
354
0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
355
The death of thread per core
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
356
A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability
An in-depth exploration of what happens when Rust and C memory allocators collide, featuring crash analysis.
357
SourceFS: A 2h+ Android build becomes a 15m task with a virtual filesystem
SourceFS - a high-performance virtual filesystem that builds Android 9× faster, cuts compute costs by 14×, and reduces disk usage by 83× — unlocking a new level of developer productivity.
358
When root meets immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. log tampering
Rafael Sadowski
359
Fundamental flaws of SIMD ISAs (2021)
According to Flynn’s taxonomy SIMD refers to a computer architecture that can process multiple data streams with a single instruction (i.e. “Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams”). There are different taxonomies, and within those several different sub-categories and architectures that classify as “SIMD”.
360
I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms