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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
Overview I’ve decided to start a series of blog posts to cover some details about scx_rustland , my little Linux scheduler written in Rust ...
This is the second part of a series of interactive articles on the x86-64 architecture. This part will focus on the first assembly instructions, visualizing the way data moves in memory when they are executed.
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
We are happy to announce that Stremio is now available for Raspberry Pi 5 and 4, installable on an SD card (of at least 8GB). Note: While the Raspberry Pi 5 is fully capable of smooth 4K playback, Raspberry Pi 4 will not be able to play 4K content due to hardware limitations. This release...
I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times and NetBSD was the best choice for it. Let's look at why its build system helps.
I am a minimalist, and I tend to always keep it as small as I can, so I try to use all I have in base (if it fits), plus of course some other tools needed.
In absolute terms they don’t have much overhead – think sub-microsecond for most uses. Which makes them perfectly acceptable when they’re used sporadically (e.g. only a few times per second).
Asynchronous code does not require the rest of your code to be asynchronous. I can’t say the same for blocking code.
Systems engineering, Rust development, and Unix infrastructure by Till Wegmüller (@toasterson)
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy , but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated.
A shiny new edition of Hypermedia Systems is out! Apart from incorporating typo and grammar fixes sent in by readers, the book was completely redesigned inside with a new layout. To achieve a much higher fidelity of design, we ported the book to Typst --- the hot new LaTeX replacement.
OrioleDB is a storage extension for PostgreSQL which uses PostgreSQL's pluggable storage system. Designed as a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL's existing Heap storage, OrioleDB aims to overcome scalability bottlenecks and fully utilize modern hardware capabilities. By integrating seamlessly with PostgreSQL, it…
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
After many months of research, development and QA, Wasmi’s most significant update ever is finally ready for production use. Wasmi is an efficient and versatile WebAssembly (Wasm) interpreter with a focus on embedded environments. It is an excellent choice for plugin systems, cloud hosts and as smart contract…
With the help of Antithesis, a startup from the founders of FoundationDB, CockroachDB engineers were able to track down and reproduce a most elusive one-in-a-million bug, nearly deterministically!
The .NET team has been working on a new experiment called async2, which is a new implementation of the async/await pattern that is designed to be more efficient and more flexible than the current implementation. It started with green threads and ended with an experiment that moves async and await to the runtime. This…
For over a year, I’ve been investigating a strange issue with the internet in my apartment. I’m posting the details here in case someone more knowledgeable than me can solve the mystery. I live in graduate student housing with internet provided by the university campus. Usually things work reasonably well, with one…
So zero-cost abstractions exist?
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
Brewer’s CAP theorem, and Gilbert and Lynch’s formalization of it , is the first introduction to hard trade-offs for many distributed systems engineers. Going by the vast amounts of ink and bile spent on the topic, it is not unreasonable for new folks to conclude that it’s an important, foundational, idea.
Narrow waists: an idea in software architecture that relates to networking, operating systems, language design, compilers, and distributed systems.
