331
PigPaxos: Removing the Scalability Bottlenecks in Paxos
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
332
Understanding Raft Consensus
Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…
333
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
334
Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …
335
AVX-512 Mask Registers, Again
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
336
Containers from first principles
You’ve likely heard everyone at the office or online proclaim that “K8s has eaten everyone’s lunch!” or that “everything should be in a docker container!”. While there are advantages to the above methodologies; it’s very easy to have cargo-culted their adoption; especially for Kubernetes (K8s). I find the biggest…
337
Implementing Raft, Part 3: Persistence and Optimizations
This is Part 3 in a series of posts describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a list of posts in the series:
338
An important safety note about chown and symlinks (also chmod and chgrp)
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…
339
What Outranks Thread Priority?
This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on.The first fe…
340
Implementing Raft: Part 2: Commands and Log Replication
This is Part 2 in a series of posts describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a list of posts in the series:
341
Modernizing the OpenBSD Console
Facts, directions, and thoughts regarding the evolution of OpenBSD framebuffer consoles
342
Shrinking a Kotlin Binary by 99.2%
We'll get to the shrinking, but first let's motivate the binary in question. Three years ago I wrote the "Surfacing Hidden Change to Pull Requests" post which covered pushing important stats and diffs into PRs as a comment. This avoids surprises with changes that affect binary size, manifests, and dependency trees.
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The Day The Standard Library Died
In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.