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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 533 posts.
For latency, anyway. A common architecture pattern is the “task queue”: tasks enter an ordered queue, workers pop tasks and process them. This pattern is used everywhere from distributed systems to thread pools. It applies just as well to human systems, like waiting in line at a supermarket or a bank. Task queues are…
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper computer:…
NOTE: Currently this guide only deals with IPv4 as most people still don't use IPv6 and many ISPs also still only use IPv4, but IPv6 is planned for a future update of the guide.
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, but it costs…
As you may already know, Apple deprecated the OpenGL rendering library in macOS Mojave and provided the Metal framework as a replacement. Metal better reflects the shift in CPU/GPU performance that ha
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
The story of how the BBC website has been completely rebuilt and moved from datacentres to the cloud.
I got into some interesting discussions about IPv6 on Twitter. Then someone asked if Android is getting DHCPv6 support in version 11 of the OS.
I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
The default filesystem will be BTRFS for Fedora 33 and onwards. Read more here about what that means for the Fedora community.
Wayland is still lacking proper consideration for color management & support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery. However, a group of renegade devs has begun an effort to fix this situation.
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan. And in a video to go along with that post, I detailed the process of drilling out a hole in the top of the official Pi 4 case and installing a 5v fan inside. But that solution wasn't great. The fan was a little loud and annoying, and would stay on…
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
I was looking at one of my classic Macs a few weeks ago, and noticed that my Ubuntu 18.04 netatalk server wasn’t showing up in the Chooser anymore. If you’re not familiar with netatalk , it’s an implementation of Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) that runs on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and NetBSD. It allows…
It has only been five years since Jeff wrote on this blog about the launch of the Amazon Elastic Container Service. I remember reading that post and thinking how exotic and unusual containers sounded. Fast forward just five years, and containers are an everyday part of most developers lives, but whilst customers are…
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
We have created the seL4 Foundation! But what is the seL4 Foundation, and why did we create it? In a nutshell, these are the reasons (I’ll expand on them below): Provide for the longevity of …
A common situation in asyncio Python programs is asynchronous initialization. Some resource must be initialized exactly once before it can be used, but the initialization itself is asynchronous — such as an asyncpg database. Let’s talk about a couple of solutions.
A community and blog for embedded software makers
Posted by Jann Horn, Project ZeroIntroductionThis blog post discusses a bug leading to memory cor...
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers can result in an integer that cannot be represented in the integer type. We often refer to such error conditions as overflows. In a programming languages…
Thanks to recent work in Chrome and Emscripten, you can now use up to 4GB of memory in WebAssembly applications. That’s up from the previous limit of 2GB. It might seem odd that there was ever a limit - after all, no work was needed to allow people to use 512MB or 1GB of memory! - but it turns out that there are some…
My last post was about either The SSH protocol or The reason you need to install a karaoke captioning library if you want to change your desktop wallpaper . Find out which .
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
