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Kernel Pwning with eBPF: A Love Story
How are low-level vulnerabilities exploited and detected in the modern age? This expert guide walks you through the ins and outs of eBPF and Kernel security.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
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Arrakis: The Operating System Is the Control Plane
Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R. K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Thomas Anderson, University of Washington; Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zürich
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Simulating RAM in Clojure
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
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1.1B taxi rides benchmark on the GPU- and PostgreSQL-powered BrytlytDB
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Assembly Language: Still Relevant Today
First, no, I don't do every thing in assembly. I use other languages too. Assembly language does have its place though. Second, a few of my points may not apply to highly complex processors; for example, self-modifying code may not work on a processor with an instruction cache .
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Migrate from Linux to FreeBSD
Easily migrate from Linux to FreeBSD. Explore key differences, insights, and useful tricks to adapt seamlessly between the two systems.
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OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers
As a PSA (public service announcement), I'm reporting here that updating your Yosemite system to 10.10.3 is incredibly toxic if you use WiFi...
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Let's consign CAP to the cabinet of curiosities
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.
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Treating performance as a product: The technical story of Asana’s rewrite
Learn how the engineering team at Asana rewrote the Asana app to improve app performance and speed from an in-depth, technical perspective.
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How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)
This is a brief mini-howto on how to build a linux based wireless router out of what amounts to spare parts, using the linux router project's single disk router software. The total cost of each end of the router, including antennas and cabling, is less than 1300 US dollars, which is a considerable cost savings over…
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OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes half an hour (2018)
So, your machine now needs minutes to boot before you can ssh in where it used to be seconds before the Debian Buster update?
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Odin: Moving Towards a New "core:OS"
The rationale and transition period to moving to the new “core:os”
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A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)
Narrow waists: an idea in software architecture that relates to networking, operating systems, language design, compilers, and distributed systems.
4875
Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) was announced in early 2015 and became generally available in 2016. We launched EFS in order to make it easier for you to build applications that need shared access to file data. EFS is (and always has been) simple and serverless: you simply create a file system, attach it […]
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Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
There is a new release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? . This release features a number of formatting and build-system improvements by the indefatigible Akira Yokosawa. On the formatting side, we have listings automatically generated from source code, clever…
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Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
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Fiber in C++: Understanding the Basics
Fiber, a less known concept compared with coroutine, is a pretty powerful addition to cooperative multitasking. As a graphics programmer in game industry, I totally appreciate the great flexibility that fiber brings on the table. As a matter of fact, I feel the tech is a little bit underappreciated due to the lack of…
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Linux's fsync() woes are getting some attention
In two weeks, I'm headed to LSF/MM and the Linux Collaboration Summit , by invitation of some Linux kernel hackers, to discuss how the Linu...
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Security researchers identify new malware targeting Linux
ESET researchers analyzed previously unknown Linux backdoors that are connected to known Windows malware used by the China-aligned Gelsemium group, as well as to Project Wood.
4884
The best worst hack that saved our bacon
No-one really likes engineering war stories, but this one's relevant because there's a moral to it. I've talked before about defining technical debt as technical decisions that provide immediate value, but with long-term negative impact if they aren't cleaned up. Sometimes introducing technical debt
4885
PyPy - We need Software Transactional Memory
Hi all. Here is (an extract of) a short summary paper about my current position on Software Transactional Memory as a general tool in the ...
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RethinkDB 2.1 beta: automatic failover with Raft
The upcoming 2.1 release will introduce important improvements , including support for automatic failover. Although we’re still hard at work on the finishing touches that will make the new features ready for production use, the beta offers an opportunity to get an early look.
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Load testing is hard and the tools are not great
If you're building an application that needs to scale—and we all tell ourselves that we are—then at some point you have to figure out if it does or not. This is where load testing comes in: if you want to see whether or not your application can handle scale, just generate scale and see if it can handle it! It sounds…
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Service mesh use cases (2020)
Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…