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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 555 posts.
“csinc”, the AArch64 instruction you didn’t know you wanted
After a long time of not publishing anything and being passive about doing any writing in this blog, I am coming back for … however many articles I can. Today I want to talk about an underrat…
FreeBSD Jails Containers
FreeBSD networking and containers (Jails) stacks are very mature and provide lots of useful features … yet for some reason these features are not properly advertised by the FreeBSD project &#…
Server-side sandboxing: Containers and seccomp
An overview of containers and seccomp as sandboxing primitives
Optimizing Open Addressing
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
Hypervisor Development in Rust
In the ever-evolving field of information security, curiosity and continuous learning drive innovation. This blog series is tailored for those deeply engaged in experimental projects, leveraging Rust’s capabilities to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The focus on Rust, after exploring various programming…
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default
Today Canonical is raising the bar for performance and observability by enabling frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. […]
The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It (2021)
50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment.
ACM Software System Award Given to seL4 Microkernel
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust…
Paving the way to efficient architectures: StripedHyena-7B
StripedHyena-7B is an open-source model built beyond the Transformer architecture, matching Llama-2 and Mistral 7B while running faster on long sequences.
My Fear of Commitment to the First CPU Core
On this Valentine's Day Weekend I share the heartbreak that caused my fear of commitment to the 1st CPU Core of any socket (not just core 0).
M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
Ode to the M1
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
ClickHouse Keeper: A ZooKeeper alternative written in C++
Read about why we built a resource-efficient alternative for Zookeeper from scratch in C++, what our next big step with it is, and how you can join the Keeper community.
BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023
A tale how running your own x509 root CA – for internal services – changed in the last 20 years.
How to train large models on many GPUs? (2021)
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks”
Java 21 VirtualThreads vs. Clojure Lazy Seqs
Welcome to the Clojure Deref! This is a weekly link/news roundup for the Clojure ecosystem (feed: RSS ). Thanks to Anton Fonarev for link aggregation.
Sonoma's log gets briefer and more secretive
In Sonoma, some healthy Macs are unable to retain complete logs for 24 hours because of the frequency of entries, and even when privacy is removed, some content is censored.
Wayland on OpenBSD
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