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LDM: My Favorite ARM Instruction
LDM—or load multiple —is my favorite assembly instruction of the ARM instruction set. Here’s why.
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Unix Wars (2000)
Unix Wars
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Geeking Out with UEFI
Some people may think some of my past posts get into the weeds, exploring the technical depths of Windows Autopilot, Intune, Windows 10, ConfigMgr, etc. But I would say those generally only g…
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Buffer overflow when pwfeedback is set in sudoers
Sudo’s pwfeedback option can be used to provide visual feedback when the user is inputting their password. For each key press, an asterisk is printed. This option was added in response to user confusion over how the standard Password: prompt disables the echoing of key presses. While pwfeedback is not enabled by…
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Big Sur on Unsupported Macs
My macOS Big Sur Patcher allowed countless users of older Macs to enjoy the new design and features of macOS Big Sur.
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Improving Postgres Connection Scalability: Snapshots
Improving connection scalability in Postgres 14. From the neat to the gritty: snapshot scalability edition.
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Using Zig to provide stack traces on kernel panic on bare metal (2018)
Last week, I reached an exciting milestone in my career as a programmer. For the first time in my life, I ran code directly on hardware , with no Operating System sitting between the bare metal and my code.
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Galileo's Ground Segment Problem
The European Global Navigation Satellite System Galileo has recently been suffering from frequent "almost disruptions", most likely partially due to Corona, and possibly also due to Brexit, but in any case due to some historical stinginess. Before I explain what is going on, I should hasten to say that most days of…
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Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications
Serverless containers and functions are widely used for deploying and managing software in the cloud. Their popularity is due to reduced cost of operations, improved utilization of hardware, and faster scaling than traditional deployment methods. The economics and scale of serverless applications…
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Allocator Designs
This post explains how to implement heap allocators from scratch. It presents and discusses different allocator designs, including bump allocation, li…
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NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
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Several months in the life of Project Zero – Part 1: The Chrome bug of suffering
Posted by Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand, Project ZeroIntroductionIt was a normal week in the Pro...
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Getting Hands-on with io_uring using Go
In Linux, system calls (syscalls) are at the heart of everything. They are the primary interface through which an application interacts with the kernel.
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Don't trust default timeouts
Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t. When you make a network call without setting a timeout, you are telling your code that you are 100% confident that the call is going to succeed. Would you really take that bet? If you…
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macOS 11 boot volume layout
A complete guide to the structure and layout of APFS startup disks from High Sierra to Big Sur (Intel), together with tear-out PDF charts.
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Speculation in JavaScriptCore
This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.
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Prepared statements and their surprising performance implications
Or: How To Increase Your Elixir/Postgres Performance 20x With One Weird Trick
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Porting Firecracker to a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
Since we got our hands on the new Raspberry Pi 4, we started exploring how various virtualization technologies behave on the board. First thing we tried is how to run Nabla on it and how it compares to native KVM. Next thing we wanted to try is firecracker, the notorious micro-VMM that Amazon Lambda & Fargate run…
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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
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Fibers, Oh My
Fibers, Oh My! # Written by Dale Weiler, last updated Oct 5th, 2020 Twitter GitHub It’s been brought to the attention of many people in the game development industry that you can use fibers to parallelize your engines and games. This one presentation in particular: Parallelizing the Naughty Dog engine using fibers has…
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Simulating RAM in Clojure
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
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Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
There is a new release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? . This release features a number of formatting and build-system improvements by the indefatigible Akira Yokosawa. On the formatting side, we have listings automatically generated from source code, clever…
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