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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,944 posts.
I wanted to share a story of a segmentation fault I helped track down this weekend. I thought the final root cause of the segfault was interesting because of how unrelated it was to the code I was trying to debug.
In Lorena's latest instalment, learn about the foundations of Elixir's power and reliability with the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM).
January 31, 2025: Post updated to clarify the reduced on-demand pricing and workloads recommendations. Just a few years ago, creating a database that could support your business at any scale while providing consistent low latency was a daunting task. That changed for me in 2012 while reading Werner Vogels’ blog post…
It’s well known that volatile in Java doesn’t mean the same thing as atomic . As Jeremy Manson says :
$ curl ‐‐http2 https://daniel.haxx.se/ curl: (1) Unsupported protocol curl on mac curl has been shipped by default on Mac OS X since many years - I actually couldn't even manage to figure out exactly how many. It is built and bundled with the operating system by Apple itself and on Apple's own terms and even ……
The product we’re building, a rack-scale computer, is specifically designed to be a centralized, integrated product because that’s what our customers need. This requirement and the design choices we’ve made to meet this need create some daily efficiency challenges for our team. As a remote-first company, we’re…
An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems Fonseca et al., EuroSys’17 “Is your distributed system bug free?” “I formally verified it!R…
Security pros have been working on a new hardware attack type that exploits cache side-effects and speculative execution to perform privileged memory disclosure.
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Apple II disk controller cards are weird, there are a crazy number of different types , and many are rare and expensive. Can an FPGA-based solution save the day for retro collectors? You bet! Nearly all the existing disk controllers connect the same 8-bit bus to the same 19-pin disk interface, so a universal clone is…
On this post we're going to talk about Eventual Consistency in the context of lock-free and wait-free data structures, with focus on the C++...
Hash tables are the most popular probabilistic data structure, by quite a margin. You compute some hash code then compute an array index from that hash code. If you’re using open addressing-c…
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Given the current register state for a thread, and read-only access to memory, what would the register state hypothetically become if the current function was to immediately return and execution was to resume in its caller?
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
This is a companion article to my talk at Neovimconf 2023. I have been using Vim/Neovim as my full time text editor for close to 10 years. I’ve spent a lot of time in the terminal and have become very aware of the many flaws and idiosyncrasies of this bizarre platform. But I also think it gets a lot of things right!…
Paying customers better get used to crowdsourced beta testing.
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
An deep dive into a pathological case.
A single-producer single-consumer (SPSC) queue is a great example of how far constraints can take a design. In this post, you will learn how to implement a ring …
In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately swap to a different allocator in a musl environment.
