Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group , we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extensions of the open-source Shakti RISC-V processor ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, my language of choice to build the…
I was trying to make my predictions for the new Formula One season by studying the aerodynamics of the cars, their cornering speeds, their ability to run with different amounts of fuel. Then it hit me: I have no idea what I'm doing.
This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to…
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
tl;dr; Redis is 16 times faster at reading these JSON blobs.*
A bundle called IncompatibleAppsList.bundle found in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/ in macOS Catalina contains a of list of 235 apps that are incompatible with Catalina.
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
telegra.ph/why-openbsd-is-marginally-less-horrible-12-052019220 points127 commentsSystems & Performance details
The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy Hellerstein & Alvaro, arXiv 2019 The CALM conjecture (and later theorem) was first introduced to the world in a 2010 keynote talk at PODS. Beh…
I have developed some interest in the Rust programming language. Rust is a systems programming language which means it gets out of the way of developers interested in reaching low-level internals of a system. What sets it aside from other systems languages though is: Borrow checking to guarantee memory safety…
Edit (2019-04-09): A quick qualifier for future readers. This post talks about correctness in the sense of correct code and not formal proofs or formal specifications. I refer to correctness in the sense of avoidable runtime errors.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...
Last December, I got an interesting bug report from the VWO support team. It seemed like the loading time of a particular analytics report was ridiculously slow for a big Enterprise customer. Since I am part of the Data platform, a flag was immediately raised and I got involved in debugging the issue.
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18 This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design…
This paper is by Abutalib Aghayev (Carnegie Mellon University), Sage Weil (Red Hat Inc.), Michael Kuchnik (Carnegie Mellon University), Mar...
After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…
If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…
M. Stoeckl's website
Every time someone reports higher latency after migrating to Kubernetes, the root cause is an assumption that changed. This is one of those stories.
One of my favorite blog posts about Rust is Things Rust Shipped Without by Graydon Hoare. To me, footguns that don't exist in a language are usually more important than expressiveness. In this slightly philosophical essay, I want to tell about a missing Rust feature I especially like: constructors.
I could not find much information on the interwebs how many containers you can run per host. So here are mine and the issues we ran into along the way.
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith…
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves cheaper than divisions. For this reason, compilers frequently replace division instructions by multiplications. Roughly speaking, it works in this manner. Suppose that you want to…
