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Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one
A very primitive version of recovery.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Machine Learning in Computer Systems Research
In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” in which he explored the question of why mathematics is so r…
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Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
GOG is great. I bought a few old games from them: SimCity 2000, Theme Hospital, Syndicate Plus. And by old games, I mean games from my childhood that still
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Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win
macOS manages the loading and frequency of M1 cores according to the QoS set, and rules which differ between the original M1 and the M1 Pro.
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Optimizing Guile Scheme
Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…
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The curious case of a memory leak in a Zig program
Digs into a unexpected memory leak when using Zig's FixedBufferAllocator
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Linux Kernel vs. DPDK: HTTP Performance Showdown
A head-to-head performance comparison between the Linux kernel's network stack, and a kernel-bypass stack powered by DPDK.
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The Future Needs Files
For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.
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Embedded Rules of Thumb (2018)
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 ……
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APFS – A Backup Software Developer’s Perspective
A backup-software developer's deep dive into Apple's APFS file system — snapshots, cloning, space sharing, and what it all means for reliable Mac backups.
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How copying an int made my code 11 times faster
I have moved off Medium to a personal blog. Click here for the updated post.
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Time protection: the missing OS abstraction
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys’19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been…
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Bit-twiddling optimizations in Zed's Rope
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio walk through the performance optimizations Antonio when working on Zed's Rope data structure before they then pair on adding more optimizations
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Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
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Perfctl: Stealthy malware targeting Linux servers
Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent malware employing several sophisticated techniques
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SQLite Begin Concurrent
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
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Faster Integer Parsing
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.
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Threads and Goroutines
So after several years of reading oversimplified and flat out incorrect comments about threads and fibers/goroutines/async/etc and fighting this reaction: I’ve decided to write my own still-over-simplified all in one guide to the difference between a couple popular threads and fiber implementations. In order to…
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Coding for SSDs
Translations: This article was translated to Simplified Chinese by Xiong Duo and to Korean by Matt Lee (이 성욱). Introduction I want to make solid-state drives (SSDs) the optimal storage solution for my key-value store project. For that reason, I had to make sure I fully understood how SSDs work, so that I can optimize
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Improved code caching
Starting with Chrome 66, V8 caches more (byte)code by generating the cache after top-level execution.
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How Computers Boot Up (2008)
The previous post described [motherboards and the memory map] memory-map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair - fun st
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A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
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The network is reliable
I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.
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Design Issues in LLVM IR
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
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CPU Counters on Apple Silicon: article + tool
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…