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Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
452
Software sandboxing: The basics (2025)
Diving into the territory of software sandboxing is diving into mostly uncharted territory. The necessary pieces to implement good sandboxing in your software are scattered all-around and the pioneers haven’t yet gathered enough knowledge into an unified mappa mundi that can guide new sailors through some well…
453
What happens when a GPU reads memory
Following an LDG.E SASS instruction through the hardware units in an RTX 4090.
454
We can do better than line-buffered output
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
455
Big-Endian Testing with QEMU
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
456
Fast and Hard Code
People pick languages differently with LLMs.
457
Building Your Own Efficient uint128 in C++
A practical walk-through of a fixed-width uint128 implementation in modern C++.
458
But can your calculator run Linux?
Published: 01-08-2026 20:08 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
459
Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
460
SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
461
Aesthetics of single threading
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
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463
Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
464
Async Rust vs RTOS showdown (2022)
It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.
465
Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing
Bringing back mid-2000s Video conferencing in Apple iChat
466
Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF
The historic go-to solution for network booting is PXE. PXE is based on DHCP and TFTP. It is tricky to correctly configure, even trickier to make it highly available and good luck with the security with this clear-text unsigned protocol.
467
Using the new bridges of FreeBSD 15
FreeBSD 15 comes with a new bridging implementation which has native support for VLANs. They have also soft-deprecated the ability to have any layer 3 addresses on member interfaces which makes it behave like a real hardware switch. The net.link.bridge.member_ifaddrs sysctl controls this behavior and it will …
468
Theseus, a Static Windows Emulator
An new old approach to emulation.
469
AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation
If you compile your app for AVX2 and it runs on Windows ARM under Prism emulation, is it faster or slower than compiling for SSE2-4.x? I assumed it would be roughly the same — maybe slightly slower due to emulation overhead, but AVX2's wider operations would compensate. The
470
Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
471
Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right
What makes BEAM and OTP different from async/await, threads, and actors. Process isolation, supervisors, and why Erlang's model keeps winning 40 years later.
472
A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server
A long, long time ago, in a land free of binary exploit mitigations, when Unix still roamed the Earth, there lived a pre-authentication Telnetd vulnerability. In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994) that it may even be older than you. To put the
473
Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
474
Making ast.walk 220x Faster
Why ast.walk when you can ast.sprint? How we made Python AST traversal 220x faster while building a custom linter for Reflex's AI code generation.
475
Spoiling Linux Kernel with "sanctioned" code
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
476
DOS Memory Management
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention.
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TCXO Failure Analysis
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
479
Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
480
Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...