Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
Windows 98 runs surprisingly well in QEMU via UTM SE, but it requires some care in setting it up. It’s a great way to run old 90s Windows and DOS software on your iPad (and Mac too, though you have… Continue reading →
This post goes through how to maximize file IO performance on linux using zig with io_uring.
Write your first hypervisor from scratch, in 1K LoC.
For the last few years, I've been developing caching library, and today I'd like to talk about the evolution of caches in Go and where we stand today. Especially since Go 1.24 was officially supposed to focus on caching improvements, but I haven't heard much news about them - time to fix that .
How hot code loading solves client-specific engineering problems in my startup Alzo
Sending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can’t create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it. The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless. I…
See how AWS Lambda arm64 stacks up against x86_64 in real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, and I/O workloads using Node.js, Python, and Rust.
Most C++ and Rust thread pools run 10x slower than OpenMP on fork-join workloads. Fork Union closes the gap to 20% with 300 lines, dodging mutexes and CAS.
Let's explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer. We’ll try to make sense of all this, one thing at a time, with a logical and coherent approach.
Binarly uncovers CVE-2025-3052: a Secure Boot bypass affecting most UEFI devices, enabling attackers to run unsigned code before OS load.
To @AndrewHart: “Our app is shit and we know it’s shit”. My life changed forever when a senior exec from one of the world’s largest retailers messaged me on Twitter. This was back in 2017. My outdoor AR navigation demos had just gone viral, and my new open-source project for...
System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development. But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest…
My CppCon 2025 talk, Practical Reflection, is now online, and goes over this example in more detail and more digressions. Check it out!
Life doesn't freeze when winter comes—if anything, that's when riders need reliable transportation most, when being exposed to the elements becomes less appealing. Today, the Waymo Driver successfully navigates rain, fog, sandstorms, and freezing temperatures. As we expand to more cities across the U.S. and globally…
In this blogpost I will step by step show you how to implement a highly efficient transpose kernel for the Hopper architecture using Mojo. The best kernel a...
It has been a really long time since I last wrote something here as life happens, things get busier, etc etc. I am now trying to get back into writing things down and here we go! So, imagine a tool or a service that allows you to run some arbitrary code via a shell. Either through a ssh or more commonly, via a web…
I’ve been working on a CLI tool recently, and one of the things it does is manage files on disk. I have written a lot of file management tests for Bundler, and the two biggest reasons that the Bundler test suite is slow are exec and fstat. Knowing that, I thought I would try to get out ahead of the slow file stat…
In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility . It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for precedence. find may…
The critical section may be an old dog, but it's still learning new tricks.
Ultrassembler is a superfast and complete RISC-V assembler library that I'm writing as a component of the bigger Chata signal processing project.
ETH Zürich’s new VMScape attack hit KVM and VMware, but Xen’s microkernel-like design kept it out of reach.
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
A 1987 technical introduction to OS/2, covering its architecture, multitasking capabilities, API, and kernel system services.
Just wondering how many transactions or writes per second MySQL can handle? While it depends on many factors, fundamentally, about as many transactions as MySQL can commit to disk per second. A modern disk can do ~1000 fsyncs per second , but MySQL will group multiple writes with each fsync. An okay rule-of-thumb…
This is a follow-up to making the rav1d video decoder 1% faster, where we compared profiler snapshots of rav1d (the Rust implementation) and dav1d (the C …
Is 1970s distributed systems theory finally meeting 2020s kernel development?
