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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.

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5227

Casually removing root files

You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…

5234

ZeroMQ: Modern & Fast Networking Stack

Berkeley Sockets (BSD) are the de facto API for all network communication. With roots from the early 1980's, it is the original implementation of the TCP/IP suite, and arguably one of the most widely supported and critical components of any operating system today. BSD sockets that most of us are familiar with are…

5237

PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack

PipeWire has already made great strides forward in terms of improving the audio handling situation on Linux, but one of the original goals was to also bring along the video side of the house. In fact in the first few releases of Fedora Workstation where we shipped PipeWire we solely enabled it as a tool...

5238

The Evolution of Caching Libraries in Go

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 .

5244

GCC Specs: An Introduction

If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…

5245

Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust

In my last post I introduced an Emacs Lisp VM I was writing in Rust. My stated goal at the time was to complete a garbage collector. I think Rust has some really interesting properties that will make building garbage collectors easier and safer. Many of the techniques used in my GC are not original and have been…

5249

Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file

Some time ago I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file, from then onward as a drive image file only. This has been contentious, and I receive emails from people lamenting the demise of the ISO. So, I should post some thoughts why I made this decision. Not an exhaustive rationale, just some thoughts while I think of…

5250

Linux – The beginning of the end?

Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole