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Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
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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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Platform-independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.27 adds an experimental platform-agnostic SIMD API
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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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Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
I built a device to measure end-to-end input latency, then used it to find out what actually moves the needle.
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Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days
Thinking through how the conventional OSS security embargoes no longer buy us time, and what open source maintainers might do instead to respond
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JPEG Compression
JPEG is a clever image compression algorithm that exploits a human perceptual bias and the structure of natural images. It makes a change of basis before encoding so that the rewritten image representation concentrates the signal that humans are most perceptive to, and thus, the remaining details can be discarded…
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RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better
Dmitry.GR: I am often asked to explain my distaste for RISC-V. Here it is.
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Love systemd timers
A cron job for every man, woman, and child.
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Twelve years of distributed SQLite
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
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LLVM: The bad parts
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
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Kitty 0.50
kitty is a feature-rich, cross-platform, fast, GPU based terminal. To update kitty, follow the instructions. Recent major new features: Docked windows [0.50]: kitty windows can now be docked to an ...
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MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
AWS launches a new serverless compute primitive, AWS Lambda MicroVMs. VM-level, isolated sandboxes with no shared kernel or resources between sessions. Rapid launch and resume, full lifecycle control, state preservation up to 8 hours, no infrastructure to manage.
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S3 Files
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
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Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
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Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
After a decade on Ubuntu 16.04, I migrated my blog to FreeBSD on Hetzner. Some notes on setting up a VPS with FreeBSD, Jails, Bastille, Caddy reverse proxies, and load testing and benchmarking the blog from four continents.
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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
How we optimized Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY-backed data streams to 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server, with millisecond-scale latency.
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Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupts downloads over Wi-Fi and TP-Link EOL'd it before I unboxed it. The fix is two zeros in sysfs. TP-Link's shell won't let me write them, so I wrote a kernel exploit for my own fucking access point.
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A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap
How a 40-line OpenJDK fix swapped slow /proc parsing for a single clock_gettime syscall, closing a 400x thread CPU-time gap hidden for 20 years.
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To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
The new "Fractal" operating system kernel, developed at MIT, gives researchers a clearer look at how computer chips work internally. It was used to study the branch predictors inside Apple's M1 processor, where it revealed a potential vulnerability to major speculative attacks.
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Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time
cybersecurity, tech, and personal annoyance log
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Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
Modern applications often spread state across a variety of systems: databases, caches, queues, data warehouses, search indices, and so on. Coordinating these systems is challenging: caches are often stale, the analytics platform might lag days behind the primary database, the search index might lose data, and…
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It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis
After a year of work, hundreds of commits, 5 generations of pull requests, dozens of tests, rewriting part of Anubis in Rust, the first compiler bug of my career, and at least three times making my tower run out of ram I think I have finally done it. The next version of Anubis will ship with WebAssembly-based proof of…
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Nobody knows how the whole system works
One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
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Building durable workflows on Postgres
Explaining the concept of a Postgres-backed durable execution system like DBOS and comparing it to external workflow orchestration systems like Temporal.
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Haiku R1/beta6 has been released
After about two years since the last beta, and only about a week after Haiku’s 25th birthday, Haiku R1/beta6 has been released! See “Release Notes” for the release notes, “Press contact”, for press inquiries … and …
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Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!