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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug. Spoiler: ultimately, patching Zsh to make it crash loudly and analyzing the crash’s core dump was the winning…
ETH Zürich’s new VMScape attack hit KVM and VMware, but Xen’s microkernel-like design kept it out of reach.
Task Manager can be lacking as a memory tracker. Let's cover alternatives to replace it. First, let’s discuss how memory allocations work in Windows.
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…
I have been playing with some LTE recordings to brush up my knowledge, since it isn’t a protocol I’m very familiar with. I’m specially interested in understanding the structure and properties of all the pilot signals. Textbooks and documentation are great, but nothing beats getting your hands dirty with some IQ…
We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.
Editors’ note: AI has been actively pushing the frontier of applied formal methods for computing systems. In this article, the Specula team wrote about their experience of evaluating LLMs on modeling system code, the basic capability for agentic model checking, using TLA+, a specification language f
There’s a lot of excitement right now about human-in-the-loop systems supercharged by foundation models including chat assistants ( ChatGPT ), word processing ( Microsoft Office ), graphic design ( Stable Diffusion ), and code editing ( Copilot ). However, these systems only begin to scratch the surface of the role…
Read the most recent Red Hat Developers blog content. Explore our featured monthly resource as well as our most recently published items.
The database is usually the most critical part of a software architecture and managing databases, especially relational ones, has never been easy. For this reason, we created Amazon Aurora Serverless, an auto-scaling version of Amazon Aurora that automatically starts up, shuts down and scales up or down based on your…
LLVM is a complex piece of software. There are several paths one may take on the quest of understanding how it works, none of which is simple. I recently had to dig in some areas of LLVM I was not previously familiar with, and this article is one of the outcomes of this quest.
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, waiting for any number…
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…
A summary of highlights from the September 2023 release of Chapel 1.32.0
The most time-consuming part of operating system development is obtaining enough drivers to enable the OS to run real applications which interact with the real world. NetBSD's rump kernels allow reducing that time to almost zero, for example for developing special-purpose operating systems for the cloud and embedded…
Explore FreeBSD's RACK TCP Stack, a dynamic pluggable TCP stack introduced in version 12, offering advanced flexibility for handling TCP flows.
In the world of matching decompilation, projects use a tool which consumes an input binary and lifts objects for comparison and linkage.
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
Exploiting and Mitigating Speculative Race Conditions GhostRace: CVE-2024-2193 Race conditions arise when multiple threads attempt to access a shared resource without proper synchronization, often leading to vulnerabilities such as concurrent use-after-free. To mitigate their occurrence, operating systems rely on…
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it. In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open…
The previous iteration of this article was too technical, too long, and contained a lot of controversial points, so I've been thinking for a long time about rewriting it completely, making it accessible to the non-technical folks, and exposing the deeper core issues that still make Linux a questionable match for the…
