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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.

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2735

A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer

Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…

2738

Let's Build an MP3 Decoder

Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…

2739

SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

Proofcraft’s Chief Engineer Rafal Kolanski has completed a major “architecture split” overhaul of the seL4 proofs, resulting in the removal of 250k lines of proof and strengthening the link between proofs on different architectures. These changes will significantly reduce future effort required to maintain and extend…

2743

Writing a RISC-V OS in Rust: System Calls

System calls are a way for unprivileged, user applications to request services from the kernel. In the RISC-V architecture, we invoke the call using the ecall instruction. This will cause the CPU to halt what it's doing, elevate privilege modes, and then jump to whatever function handler is stored in the mtvec…

2747

Some Reasons to Measure

A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse , keyboard , terminal and…