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M1 Macs have another hidden boot mode
Apple has revealed the hidden Fallback Recovery OS mode available on M1 Macs. How to enter and use it, and why it’s another big plus.
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The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now
When the Compute Module 4 was released (see my CM4 review here), I asked the Pi Foundation engineers when we might be able to boot off NVMe storage, since it was trivially easy to use with the exposed PCIe x1 lane on the CM4 IO Board. The initial response in October 2020 was "we'll see". Luckily, after more people…
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Authenticated Boot and Disk Encryption on Linux
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery
I got the chance to investigate an interesting bug in SerenityOS this week. It was related to the decoding of JPG images in the operating system. For some reason, when a JPG image is viewed, it comes out like this: Lenna, showing up with incorrect colors. Weird, huh? Also seems like a simple confusion of RGB vs. BGR…
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.NET 6 vs .NET 5 speedup
A year ago I wrote a post comparing .NET 5 performance with its predecessor on Fusion performance tests, and honestly, I was quite…
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There is no 'printf'
In C, 'main' returns an int. What happens when you don't explicitly return a value, though? C99 provides a return value of 0, but C89... well, that's undefined, my favorite kind of behavior.
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Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
Erik Bernhardsson
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GC progress from JDK 8 to JDK 17
JDK 17 has been out for a few months and it’s not just packed with new language features. The performance boost compared to older JDK versions is also really significant. It becomes especially clear when compared to the previous LTS releases, JDK 8 and JDK 11. Much of the improved performance comes from new features…
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Software Architecture Patterns: 5 minute read
Main software architecture patterns in a nutshell.
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The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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Patterns of Distributed Systems (2020)
A catalog of patterns to better understand, communicate, and teach the design of distributed systems
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Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System
macOS 11.2, 11.2.1 and 11.2.2 have come in quick succession. What do they tell us about how difficult it is to update Big Sur’s sealed System volume? Is this the way to go?
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Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator
How does a terminal emulator work? What are ANSI escape codes? Understanding terminal internals for development, fun and mischief.
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Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that
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2021 Williams F1 Computational Fluid Dynamics
Thanks to some clever people I was able to get a CAD model of the current 2021 Williams F1 car — that’s not something that happens every day, so of course I had to run CFD on it. CAD Ge…
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How C++ Resolves a Function Call
C is a simple language. You’re only allowed to have one function with each name. C++, on the other hand, gives you much more flexibility: You can have multiple functions …
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M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board
Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects. You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but... well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling…
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Avoiding Complexity with Systemd
Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code
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You need to be able to run your system
"Run the unit tests" doesn't count. The complexity of your system is in the interactions between the units.
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Writing a register based VM in less than 125 lines of C code
This tutorial is intended for intermediate C developers who want to get some coding practice and, in the process, gain valuable insights into low-level programming and how (some) Virtual Machines operate under the hood. The reader should already be comfortable with bitwise operations, hexadecimal notation, pointers…
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Io_uring is not an event system
I’ve been hearing about io_uring on and off for the last couple of years. Its a relatively new technology in Linux to allow high-performance IO with very few overheads. Whenever its been mentioned, its usually been presented as a new alternative to select, poll and epoll. This led me to believe that it was just the…
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Firefox's Optimized Zip Format
This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11…