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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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The power of interning: making a time series database smaller
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
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Reverse-Engineering the Intel Management Engine
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.
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Suicide Linux
You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway?* Such as when changing directory, or opening a file. I have an idea: Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter cr...
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M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
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Networking changes coming in macOS 27
We are under warning that macOS 27 is likely to remove support for AFP, and lately some additional requirements for connection to certain servers. This explains how these could affect you.
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Fish shell 2.0
fish 2.0 is now released! fish is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that is smart and user-friendly. fish supports powerful features like syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that just work, with nothing to learn or configure.
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How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)
FoundationDB is a very impressive database. Its paper won the best industry paper award in SIGMOD’21. In this post, I will explain, in detail, how FDB works and discuss a few very interesting design choices they made. It’s a dense paper packed with neat ideas. Many details (sometimes even proof of correctness) are not…
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Addressing the adding situation
We learn why adding on x86 isn't as obvious as you might think
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Apple Silicon Hardware: SPRR and Guarded Exception Levels (GXF)
Over a year ago siguza published a write-up about Apple’s APRR - a custom ARM extension that redefines pagetable permissions and protects certain parts of the kernel from itself. Since then Apple has released their M1 chip which not only features an updated version of APRR but also easily allows to run bare-metal code…
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How to get the most out of Postgres memory settings
Engineering deep-dives, product updates, and company news from Tembo — the platform for running coding agents across your stack.
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Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go
Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
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Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
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Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
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Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?
On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844 , aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and…
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Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
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Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
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Remote code execution in OpenSSH’s forwarded SSH-agent
CVE-2023-38408 is a remote code execution flaw in OpenSSH’s forwarded ssh-agent. Get full exploit details, impact analysis, and Qualys detection guidance.
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PulseAudio under the hood
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Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
As announced on the mailing list , on Friday, Dec 27 2019, our package compression scheme has changed from xz (.pkg.tar.xz) to zstd (.pkg.tar.zst) .
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AWS launches ARM-powered Lambdas
Discover more about what's new at AWS with Achieve up to 34% better price/performance with AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processor
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Advanced Mac Substitute: API-level reimplementation of classic Mac OS
Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS. It runs 68K Mac applications in an emulator without an Apple ROM or system software .
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Building a Shop with Sub-Second Page Loads: Lessons Learned
Here is the story of how we leveraged research on web-caching and NoSQL systems to prepare a webshop for hundreds of thousands of visitors…
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Booting Linux in QEMU and Writing PID 1 in Go to Illustrate Kernel as Program
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes. In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
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Modernizing “less”
I have just spent an all-nighter doing something I didn't expect to do. I've " modernized " less (1). (That link is to the changeset.) ...
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Installing Every Arch Package
Using algorithms and Julia to install as many packages as possible from the Arch Linux official repositories
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