Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 555 posts.
Explore the risks associated with unaligned pointer accesses in GCC. Understand how these assumptions can lead to unexpected program behavior and potential security vulnerabilities. Learn best practices to mitigate these risks and write secure code.
Using assembly language test loops to understand the differences between M1 Pro and M3 Pro CPU cores casts new light on their differences.
bfs is a tool I wrote to do b readth- f irst s earch through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it’s grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations. The new 3.0 release series includes the biggest new feature so far…
In this post, we will discuss the challenges of programming with locks and how the C++ language offers some useful tools to make it easier. We will start with an example in C and then use C++ to improve upon it in steps. The example APIs are based on real-life APIs from the SerenityOS kernel.
If it’s so easy to uninstall a troublesome RSR, why can’t we simply roll back to a previous version of macOS, like we did in High Sierra?
Scaling GAIA-1: a 9-billion parameter generative world model for autonomous driving
I recently started exploring link-time optimisation (LTO), which I used to think was just a single boolean choice in the compilation and linking workflow, and perhaps it was like that a while ago… I’ve learned that these days, there are many different dimensions of LTO across compilers and linkers today and more…
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, DbgRs could finally set breakpoints. That was the last really critical feature needed for controlling execution of a program. Now that it can stop on an arbitrary function or code location, the next step is to find more information about…
For years, macOS upgrades have broken Nix. We've updated the Determinate Nix Installer to ensure that this no longer happens, eliminating yet another annoyance for macOS users.
Intel investigated architectural enhancements and modifications for a 64-bit mode-only architecture.
In my video about the Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!). Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
Our strategy for making updates and maintaining stability while we migrate languages.
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
Real-time Ubuntu brings end-to-end security and reliability to the time-bound workloads of modern enterprises. With support for real-time compute, Canonical furthers its commitment to providing a best-in-class experience for open-source software consumption. 14 February 2023, London: Canonical today announced the…
I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my expe…
In the previous year I wrote a program, running on Intel's first microprocessor - 4004, that computes the first 255 digits of π. So let's continue our journey with the successor - the Intel 4040.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
In the recent past, a typical client/server environment consisted of multiple clients connected to a central database server. A central database architecture is a system where all data is stored in a single centralized location. When client A from Si...
Just as Vulnerability Research is an important area of focus at Google, so is Vulnerability Response to critical and complex vulnerabilities. Vulnerability Response at Google not only helps secure Google’s products and users, but in certain cases, it affects millions of devices across the Internet. In this post, we'll…
How Netflix’s Container Platform Connects Linux Kernel Panics to Pods
Windows XP I have a lot of fond memories of Windows XP and after feeling nostalgic, I was happy to find out that it’s relatively easy to take it for a spin on an ARM64 Mac using QEMU. I decided to install XP and an assortment of classic software one final time, taking screenshots of the whole process. This included…
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
Someone mentioned cargo-bloat the other day and it reminded me that I have been wanting to measure the code size for generic functions in librsvg, and see if there are improvements to be made.
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
I always got fascinated by heap memory. Questions such as How heap memory is obtained from kernel? How efficiently memory is managed? Is it managed by kernel or by library or by application itself?…
How we gained 2–3% improvements in compile times by making GHC better at printing code.
Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is often called…
