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Lost Generation: The Relay Computers
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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DragonflyBSD 5.0
DragonFly version 5.0 brings the first bootable release of HAMMER2, DragonFly's next generation file system.
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Pillow-SIMD – Fast, production-ready image resize for x86
Learn how Uploadcare engineers found out how to resize images on Intel processors faster than Intel itself
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Goroutines, Nonblocking I/O, and Memory Usage
I am generally a fan of Go's approach to concurrency: writing code with goroutines is a lot easier than writing traditional nonblocking network servers in a language like C or C++. However, while working on a highly concurrent network proxy I came across an interesting realization about how the Go concurrency model…
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The Limits of the CAP Theorem
This post explains how CAP-Consistent systems can be highly available, how the CAP theorem applies to CockroachDB, and why consistency is the better choice.
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Using select(2) the right way
This started out as a Hacker News comment about a blog post about select being fundamentally broken After that the same author wrote why epoll is broken as well. I don’t know what problem author is trying to solve but let’s pick this one:
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Using Binary Diffing to Discover Windows Kernel Memory Disclosure Bugs
Posted by Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project ZeroPatch diffing is a common technique of comparing ...
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Tendermint 0.10.2
Tendermint is a server and a protocol for building linearizable (or sequentially consistent) byzantine fault-tolerant applications. Tendermint validators accept transactions from clients over HTTP, and replicate them to the other validators in the cluster, forming a totally ordered sequence of transactions. Each…
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An Ancient Kernel Hole Is Not Closed
The "stack clash" series of vulnerabilities were a prime opportunity to demonstrate the strength of grsecurity's approach to security. Unlike upstream Linux and other OSes, the issues uncovered were unexploitable under grsecurity for many years.
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Research papers in the .NET source
This post is completely inspired by (or ‘copied from’ depending on your point of view) a recent post titled JAVA PAPERS (also see the HackerNews discussion). However, instead of looking at Java and the JVM, I’ll be looking at references to research papers in the .NET language, runtime and compiler source code.
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Storage engine design
In time-series databases the querying pattern differs from the write pattern. We usually write data in time order by updating many series every second. But querying is a different story. We usually want to read only a handful of series leaving most of the data behind. Here lies the biggest problem, which is we don’t…
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Over the Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack (Part 2)
Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project ZeroIn this blog post we'll continue our journey into gaining re...
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Using cgroups to limit I/O
Developers running their apps on tsuru can choose plans based on memory and cpu usage. We were looking at adding I/O usage as one of the plan’s features, so one could choose how many I/O operations per second or bytes per second a container may be able to read/write. Being able to limit I/O is particulary important…
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C++ on Embedded Systems
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
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27000 errors in the Tizen operating system
This article will demonstrate that during the development of large projects static analysis is not just a useful, but a completely necessary part of the development process. This article is the first...
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Disable transparent hugepages
tl;dr “Transparent Hugepages” is a Linux kernel feature intended to improve performance by making more efficient use of your processor’s memory-mapping hardware. It is enabled ("enabled=always") by default in most Linux distributions. Transparent Hugepages gives some applications a small performance improvement (~ 10%…
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How LZ4 works (2016)
LZ4 is an exciting algorithm, but unfortunately there is no good explanation on how it works. This blog post tries to explain it in terms that everybody can understand.
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Mac OS High Sierra automatically checks EFI firmware each week
Every week, Macs running High Sierra will check the integrity of their EFI firmware, in a bid to detect tampering by malware.
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Ubuntu 17.04 Released
Ubuntu 17.04 released today, supporting Kubernetes, Docker, LXD and Snaps. This is the 26th release of Ubuntu, the world’s most widely deployed Linux OS and the leading platform for cloud and IoT operations. “The breadth and pace of open source innovation has made it the center of gravity in technology today, and the…
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The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008)
Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages.