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So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
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The most remarkable legacy system I have seen
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a bank sometime back. This could be summarized as an internal AWS lambda equivalent. The offering was complete with full CI, CD, unit te…
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Flow browser passes the Acid tests
Ekioh's multithreaded, parallel, Flow browser passes all three Acid tests.
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Cloudflare outage on July 17, 2020
Today a configuration error in our backbone network caused an outage for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 27 minutes. We saw traffic drop by about 50% across our network.
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SQLite Is Serverless
Most SQL database engines are implemented as a separate server process. Programs that want to access the database communicate with the server using some kind of interprocess communication (typically TCP/IP) to send requests to the server and to receive back results. SQLite does not work this way. With SQLite, the…
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There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
The Google Cloud Console UI is a large JavaScript application. This article investigates how it could be sped up.
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Speeding up Linux disk encryption
Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers!
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UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming
Probability problems come up a lot in systems programming, and I’m using that term loosely to mean everything from operating systems programming and networking, to building large online services, to creating virtual worlds like in games. Here’s a bunch of rough-and-ready probability rules of thumb that are deeply…
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Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.
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Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are memory safety problems
The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems . Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source.
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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Linux containers in a few lines of code
Trying to figure out how Linux containers work by implementing them from scratch in C.
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3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust
How we chose the Rust programming language to advance the state-of-the-art in real-time communication
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Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages filesystem on SSDs with KB4592438 installed
[German]In Windows 10 20H2 with installed cumulative update KB4592438, chkdsk causes massive issues. It destroys the file system during a disk check on SSDs, so Windows 10 can’t start after a reboot.
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1195725856 and other mysterious numbers
Last week was the final week for this half's performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last h...
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How are Unix pipes implemented?
The implementation and history of an iconic Unix feature, with excerpts from the v6 Unix kernel source code, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen
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14,000x Speedup (2015)
In my job as a scientific software developer, I tend to write a lot of code. And most people who haven’t been through a Computer Science degree tend to think that CS is “just” about slinging code at the screen and then running it. I have a good working relationship with many of my colleagues and co-workers with other…
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Getting started with bare-metal assembly
Seeing a program you wrote running directly on the bare metal is deeply satisfying to anyone who enjoys writing software. And it turns out that creating such a program from scratch is easier than it sounds. The hardest part is figuring out where to start. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to write, build and run the…
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