Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 358 posts.

Systems & Performance
277

FreeBSD Audio

I started using FreeBSD in 2016 as a dual-boot with Linux. The reason was that at the time Linux provided no support for real-time threads and preemptive scheduling but did provide a wider choice of audio applications. Today, as the FreeBSD audio ecosystem improved a lot, I am a happy single-OS user. You may ask…

300

Prefix sum on portable compute shaders

This is a followup to my previous post, prefix sum on Vulkan. Last year, I got a fancy algorithm for this problem running well on one device. This time, I will dive into the question of how to make it work well across a wide range of devices. The short answer is, it can be made to work pretty portably on Vulkan and…