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Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
Published: 05-07-2026 20:33 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
392
Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral
I get kidnapped by the MIG while adding DDR3 to our CPU
393
The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU
杰哥的{教学，运维，编程，调板子}小笔记
394
Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
In the 1970s, floating-point arithmetic was a mess. Computer manufacturers had a dozen incompatible arithmetic standards. Moreover, floating...
395
Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning
Linux latency on the desktop and in games compared to Windows. Network streaming with Sunshine and Moonlight. Tuning the KWin compositor for lower latencies.
396
Why is the first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?
Why is my first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?? It’s the ’emergency pool’ for exceptions, here’s how I uncovered it using GDB and digging through the source code of libstdc++, glibc and Valgrind!
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Monzo Stand-In
Our customers reasonably expect to be able to spend on their card, make bank transfers and pay their bills 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Their lives don’t have downtime for maintenance so nor should we. We dedicate a lot of our engineering effort to minimise the risk of downtime during technical migrations and…
398
Zero-copy protobuf and ConnectRPC for Rust
As part of my work at Anthropic, I open sourced two Rust crates that fill a gap in the RPC ecosystem: buffa, a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers…
399
A few CPU hardware bugs
Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since…
400
Postgres Postmaster does not scale
Why Postgres postmaster contention becomes a bottleneck at scale, how connection bursts and worker churn trigger it, and which fixes helped in production.
401
Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
This is exciting news, there is a fork of Qemu that has workable Itanium Merced emulation, and it’s good enough to run Windows XP/2003! Enter Malte Kuhlmann ‘s Qemu fork of syunnPC ‘s AI Itanium infused Qemu fork .
402
Columnar Storage Is Normalization
Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept...
403
AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop Reloaded
My previous AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop is still up and running – it will now be my kids computer … so I needed a new one … but not a bigger one :) I spent way too much time finding…
404
Linux Internals: How /proc/self/mem writes to unwritable memory (2021)
Introduction An obscure quirk of the /proc/*/mem pseudofile is its “punch through” semantics. Writes performed through this file will succeed even if the destination virtual memory is marked unwritable. In fact, this behavior is intentional and actively used by projects such as the Julia JIT compiler and rr debugger…
405
Zigzag Decoding with AVX-512
I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have…
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MacOS Extensions Pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0
By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server , Apple's Unix-through-and-thro...
408
The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
A practical introduction to TLA+, why it matters for agentic coding, and how AI could take formal verification from models to machine-checked proofs and ultimately to verified software.
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TigerBeetle Core System Architecture: Deconstructing Performance Engineering
An in-depth technical analysis of TigerBeetle's core architecture, exploring how static memory allocation, zero-copy io uring interfaces, and Zig-based…
411
Making Postgres queues scale
Lessons learned from scaling Postgres-backed durable queues for users running tens of billions of workflows per month.
412
Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
i wanted to have a deeper grasp of how compression works, so i wrote a gzip decompressor from scratch. the result is about 250 lines of rust that can decompress gzip from a file or stdin.
413
Native ZFS VDEV for Object Storage (OpenZFS Summit)
We presented MayaNAS at OpenZFS Developer Summit 2025, introducing objbacker.io—a native ZFS VDEV for object storage. No FUSE, direct kernel-to-SDK integration achieving 3.7 GB/s throughput.
414
An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
415
Ok, but does it scale?
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…
416
Engineering for Bounded Cognition
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
417
AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability
A simple, whitespace theme for academics. Based on [*folio](https://github.com/bogoli/-folio) design.
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Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different
Virtualising macOS, Linux and Windows on Intel Macs has been relatively straightforward, and device support left to the developer. That won’t work for Apple silicon Macs. This explains what h…
420
State of Homelab 2026
Evolution of a self-hosting hobby: from clueless to amateur.