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Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers
How difficult could it really be?
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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How fast is N tokens per second really?
Every local-LLM benchmark reports throughput: "47 tok/s on an M3," "180 tok/s on a 4090," "500 tok/s on Groq." Unless you've actually watched tokens stream at those rates, the numbers are hard to internalize. This is the rendering.
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3,200% CPU Utilization
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
The Google Cloud Console UI is a large JavaScript application. This article investigates how it could be sped up.
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AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage
[Update: Wladimir Palant has posted a response on the AdBlock Plus blog. Also, a Chrome developer using the handle “Klathmon” has posted numerous good comments in the Reddit discussion of this post , explaining why ad-blockers are inherently CPU- and memory-intensive, and why integrating ad-blocking into a browser…
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Delivering Billions of Messages Exactly Once
The single requirement of all data pipelines is that they cannot lose data. Data can usually be delayed or re-ordered–but never dropped.
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SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
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Speeding up Linux disk encryption
Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers!
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Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT
Designed to bring aggressive C-like optimizations to the largest variety of JavaScript programs.
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UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
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View Counting at Reddit
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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Saving another 100TB of RAM
Cloudflare's global network is immense but not limitless. As we look for small ways to trim our resource usage, we sometimes get lucky and we can cut significantly more. Here’s how we reduced one of our Pingora-based service's RAM usage with statistics.
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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…
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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
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Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
A deep dive into Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel architecture, tracing its evolution from Mach and BSD roots to powering macOS, iOS, and Apple Silicon. This post explores the hybrid kernel’s design, its adaptation to new hardware and security paradigms, and why XNU remains a uniquely resilient and scalable foundation…
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The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
A detailed walkthrough of the Linux boot process from power button to kernel initialization
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DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
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DuckDB Internals Part 1
Walk through DuckDB's internals: how it skips serialization overhead, parses and optimizes SQL, and stores data in columnar row groups with zone maps.
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Leaky Abstractions
In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond…
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63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions
I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how …
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop
I’d recently bought a new XPS13 7390 (non 2-in-1) laptop. I had bought the 8GB variant, how hard could it be to upgrade?