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APFS in Detail
Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 423 posts.
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Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years
When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to …
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Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions
The portfolio of AWS storage products has grown increasingly rich and diverse over time. Amazon S3 started out with a single storage class and has grown to include storage classes for regular, infrequently accessed, and archived objects. Similarly, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) began with a single volume…
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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Haiku booting in UEFI mode
As some may have noticed, my UEFI branch got merged in November, purely by accident too! However, until now, we still haven't been able to boot to the desktop. Whilst still in development, the addition of a simple framebuffer driver and a crucial fix …
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Why Kubernetes isn't using Docker's libnetwork
Kubernetes has had a very basic form of network plugins since before version 1.0 was released — around the same time as Docker's libnetwork and Container Network Model (CNM) was introduced. Unlike libnetwork, the Kubernetes plugin system still retains its "alpha" designation. Now that Docker's network plugin support…
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How to Crash Systemd in One Command
After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login…
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A x64 OS #1: UEFI
I briefly cover what it takes to start writing a kernel which bootstraps in UEFI, as opposed to BIOS.
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Syscall Auditing at Scale
If you are are an engineer whose organization uses Linux in production, I have two quick questions for you: 1) How many unique outbound TCP connections have your servers made in the past hour? 2) Which processes and users initiated each of those connections? If you can answer both of these questions, fantastic! You…
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Big News for ZFS on Linux
Canonical announced a few weeks ago that ZFS will be included in the next release of Ubuntu Linux, on by default and fully supported. And it’s no exaggeration…
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Building a more power-efficient browser
Today, Jason Weber shared a post on the Windows Experience Blog demonstrating the power efficiency of Microsoft Edge over other popular browsers on Windows 10. With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we are hard at work pushing the envelope further, engineering Microsoft Edge to last even longer with typical…
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Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data
(Edit: This article is now up on hacker news, feel free to discuss there)
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Our best practices are killing mobile web performance
Web performance rules invented for desktop web access need to be revised for the mobile era.
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles
Quote: Back in 80s, it was possible to calculate the speed of the program just by looking at assembly. Another Quote: keep in mind that these days compilers ...
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Analysis and Exploitation of a Linux Kernel Vulnerability
FortiMail Workspace Security secures user-facing apps from advanced threats that target Email, Browsers, Collaboration Tools and Cloud Storage Apps.
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Introducing Docker for Windows Server 2016
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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Tips for beginning systems and software engineers
From time to time I’m toying with the idea to give a lecture to newcomers in the IT industry (systems or software engineers). Here are some of the points that I would include in it: Human fa…
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Memory management in C programs (2014)
One large difference between C and most other programming languages is that in C, you have to handle memory yourself rather than having a garbage collector do it for you. Ensuring that memory is allocated at the correct moment is not very difficult (and something that needs to be done manually in pretty much every…
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Feeding data to 1000 CPUs – comparison of S3, Google, Azure storage
Benchmarking throughput and latency of Amazon AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and Microsoft Azure Storage object storage services
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