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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

Any year
3724

Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM

In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker , mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM , a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu . What baffled me was the speed at which the virtual machine would fire up and run the service. The whole process is to be compared…

3726

Understanding x86_64 Paging

I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…

3729

Getting Started with Tokio

If you're interested in writing servers in Rust, Tokio is a project that should definitely be on your radar. It promises to leverage the exciting new work on futures in Rust to make it easy to build extremely efficient networked servers with natural, composable code.

3732

OpenZFS vs. Btrfs and other file systems (2017)

Michael Dexter returns to update his blog post on the different file systems and details some key developments that are unfolding. He covers what's being added to these respective file systems: OpenZFS, Btrfs, and bcachefs. Michael Dexter has invested his volunteer time and career in Open Source hypervisors and file…

3733

Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems

I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…