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In defense of Unix
While there may be some situations in which DOS has a better command, Unix works better overall.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
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Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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RISC-V is currently slow compared to modern CPUs
RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.
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Updates for older platforms to protect against potential nation-state activity
Microsoft releases additional updates for older platforms to protect against potential nation-state activity
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What's wrong with systemd
So many weird little demands on time, mostly spinning out of the Signal groups set up to counter ICE and now being used for general community stuff.
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
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Please stop writing new serialization protocols
It seems that every day, some computer monkey comes up with a new and more groovy serialization protocol. In the beginning, there was ASN.1 and XDR, and it was good. I think ASN.1 came first, and l…
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
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On Cache Invalidation: Why Is It Hard? (2018)
Many people must have heard this quote (by Phil Karlton) many times: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Two days ago, Nick Tierney mentioned it …
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Rethinking Files
In Unix, everything is a file. This is often viewed as a positive, but it's often a poor abstraction for many things. This discussion goes into some of the issues.
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Transcoding Unicode with AVX-512: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Ice Lake
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…
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Tokio internals: Understanding Rust's async I/O framework
Tokio is a Rust framework for developing applications which perform asynchronous I/O — an event-driven approach that can often achieve better …
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Reassessing Wayland
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…
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Memory safety for the world’s largest software project
Rust for Linux and Prossimo The Rust for Linux project aims to bring a new system programming language into the Linux kernel. Rust has a key property that makes it very interesting to consider as the second language in the kernel: it guarantees no undefined behavior takes place (as long as unsafe code is sound)…
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The Linux kernel has been accidentally hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores
TL;DR This doesn’t mean that the scheduler can’t use more than 8 cores. The scheduler controls how to allocate tasks to available cores. How to schedule particular workloads efficiently…
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InfluxDB Clustering Design – Neither CP or AP
A few weeks ago I hinted at some big changes coming in the InfluxDB clustering design. These changes came about because of the testing weve done over the last 3 months with the clustering design that was going to be shipped in 0.9.0.
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TCXO Failure Analysis
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
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Speeding up Go's built-in JSON encoder for large arrays of objects
I was looking into some of octosql 's benchmarks the other day and noticed a large chunk of time in DataStation / dsq is spent in encoding JSON objects. JSON is an intermediate format in DataStation and it's pretty inefficient. But the reason it's used is because almost every scripting language supported by…
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FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
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The Making of Side 7: Gundam Evolution private server project
Project community server: https://discord.gg/side7 On September 20th, 2022, the live-service first-person hero shooter "GUNDAM EVOLUTION" was launched. A little over a year later, on November 29th, 2023, it abruptly reached its end of life. As a passionate enthusiast of hero shooters and the Gundam franchise, the…
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The BEAM needs an APL-y language
One like, one unpopular opinion is one of them top Twitter games, innit?
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PostgreSQL Subtransactions Considered Harmful
PostgreSQL subtransactions (nested transactions) may cause multiple performance and scalability issues: higher rates of XID growth and higher risks of transaction ID wraparound, performance degradation when more than PGPROC_MAX_CACHED_SUBXIDS (64) are used in a session, drastic performance slowdowns when…
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Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …