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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Surprisingly fast AI-generated kernels we didn't mean to publish yet
We have some very fast AI-generated kernels in pure CUDA-C without using libraries and DSLs such as CUTLASS and Triton. They are performing close to or in some cases even beating the standard expert-optimized production kernels shipped in PyTorch. Some of our highlighted results:
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GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years
GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499) is a Linux kernel vulnerability found by Nebu that exists in every major distribution since 2011. Triggering the bug does not require any special kernel config or privilege. By turning it into a 97% stable privilege escalation and container escape, Google has rewarded us $92,337 in…
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Avoiding the top Nginx configuration mistakes
Deliver modern applications with NGINX. Explore high-performance load balancing, API gateways, and web server solutions trusted by top global enterprises.
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Amazon Aurora Backtrack
We’ve all been there! You need to make a quick, seemingly simple fix to an important production database. You compose the query, give it a once-over, and let it run. Seconds later you realize that you forgot the WHERE clause, dropped the wrong table, or made another serious mistake, and interrupt the query, but the […]
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Remote code execution vulnerability in apt/apt-get
tl;dr I found a vulnerability in apt that allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine i...
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PostgreSQL: No More Vacuum, No More Bloat
PostgreSQL, a powerful open-source object-relational database system, has been lauded for its robustness, functionality, and flexibility. However, it is not without its challenges – one of which is the notorious VACUUM process. However, the dawn of a new era is upon us with OrioleDB, a novel engine designed for…
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Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2
This article reveals the stats that show two frequently used system calls are 77% slower on AWS EC2 and its causes.
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Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
For the past two years Charles Zhang and I have been working on getting my game engine, Trial, running on the Nintendo Switch. The primary challenge in doing this is porting the underlying Common Lisp runtime to work on this platform. We knew going into this that it was going to be hard, but it has proven to be quite…
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ZFS for Dummies
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).
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Platform-independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.27 adds an experimental platform-agnostic SIMD API
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How small is the smallest .NET Hello World binary?
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string"Hello, World!" to the standard output?
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Comparing Parallel Rust and C++
In this tutorial, we will implement a Rust program that attempts to utilize 100% of the theoretical capacity of three relatively modern, mid-range CPUs. We'll use an existing, highly efficient C++ implementation as a reference point to compare how our Rust program is doing. We start with a simple baseline solution of…
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Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
An analysis of the Croatian classic.
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What they don't teach you about sockets
In order to effectively write applications that communicate via sockets, there were some realizations I needed to make that weren't explicitly told to me by any of the documentation I read.
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Ceph: A Journey to 1 TiB/s
Ceph is an open source distributed storage system designed to evolve with data.
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USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers
A basic introduction to USB for people that don't need to know what happens on the wire
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Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
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MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
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Kill Your Dependencies
This post talks about Ruby but it’s true of every language community: Python, JavaScript, Java, etc. The scourge of dependencies spares no one. This is a dependency visualization of every Rails app I’ve ever used. Does any of this sound familiar: Gemfile with 100s of entries. Test gems loading in production. Each…
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We replaced Firecracker with QEMU
Firecracker is not the best choice for all kinds of workloads.