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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,944 posts.
They say “performance is king’… It was true a decade ago and it certainly is now. With more and more data the world generates each day, we need more and more computing power to process it. It used to be the case that some SW vendors preferred to wait for a new generation of HW to speed up their application and did not…
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
It's no surprise that modern deep-learning libraries have production-level, highly-optimized implementations of most operations. But just what is the black magic that these libraries use that we mere mortals don't? What exactly does one do to "optimize" or accelerate neural networks operations?
I maintain two builds of the Linux kernel, a linux/arm64 build for gokrazy, my Go appliance platform, which started out on the Raspberry Pi, and then a linux/amd64 one for router7, which runs on PCs. The update process for both of these builds is entirely automated, meaning new Linux kernel releases are automatically…
Over the course of working on PSRayTracing (PSRT), I've been trying to find all sorts of tricks and techniques to squeeze out more performance from this C++ project. Most of it tends to be alternative algorithms, code rewriting, and adjusting data structures. I thought sprinkling the final keyword like an all purpose…
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one.
In the beginning, there was the egg. Then fictional people started eating that from different ends, and the terms of "little endians" an...
Large-scale distributed software systems are composed of several individual sub-systems—such as CDNs, load balancers, and databases—and their interactions. These interactions sometimes have unpredictable outcomes caused by unforeseen turbulent events (for example, a network failure). These events can lead to…
In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks. The first commit had only a few…
It's easy to append bytes to the end of a file: Just open it for writing, seek to the end, and start writing. It's also easy to delete bytes from the end
The 3 - d acceleration feature of VirtualBox has had a bit of a rough time this year . One could argue that technically this component might not be considered attack surface in VirtualBox, due to the big warning put out in the documentation recommending against its use (emphasis mine):
A comparative study of processor architectures.
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Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
Facts, directions, and thoughts regarding the evolution of OpenBSD framebuffer consoles
A few months ago I got to debug and fix an interesting bug in the Csharp virtual terminal library VtNetCore . We use VtNetCore at BastionZero to extract terminal commands in realtime from user terminal sessions as they flow over the wire. This requires feeding the standard out and standard err of a terminal session…
I have been saying for years that I am seeing the same phenomonon today that I saw thirty years ago when the microprocessor was first invented. At that time I argued a lot with all the computer scientists. They insisted that microprocessors were not really computers because they did not run the same software that…
We live in an age of rapid innovation; Every year, there is a new iPhone, three new crypto currencies, five new AWS services, and a hundred new JavaScript frameworks. We have been conditioned to expect new shiny things, to the point where many people equate “new” with “better” .
Sometimes a good plan is the best tool for the job.
I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/outpu...
Version 0.9 of the Zig programming language is planned to release in about a week. One of the major changes coming in this release is a restructuring of how allocators work, which has been termed Allocgate . This is a breaking change to the Allocator API provided by the standard library, so pretty much any code that…
If you've ever look at the disassembly output for C or C++ code, you'll probably notice that there are a lot of push/pop instructions. And if you pay close enough attention, you'll notice that the compiler prefers to use certain registers over others. In particular, compilers will prefer pushing "old" registers like…
Using QUIC to achieve everything needed for NAT traversal, from address discovery to proxying UDP
