Docker has recently stormed into software development. While its concepts are powerful and valuable, similar tools have been used in systems for decades. FreeBSD’s jails in one of those tools which build upon even older chroot(2). To put it shortly, with these tools, you can make a safe environment separated from the…
libdivide is fish ’s library for speeding up integer division by runtime constants. It works by replacing divide instructions with cheaper multiplications and shifts.
Setting up a single node Nomad and Consul server to deploy self hosted workloads.
Personal webpage of Fabian Mentzer.
How X Window Managers Work, And How To Write One (Part I)
After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel "Evo"-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.
Over a year ago siguza published a write-up about Apple’s APRR - a custom ARM extension that redefines pagetable permissions and protects certain parts of the kernel from itself. Since then Apple has released their M1 chip which not only features an updated version of APRR but also easily allows to run bare-metal code…
Published: 10-07-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
When Martin Fowler's post about microservices came out in 2014, the teams where I worked were already building service-oriented architectures. That post and the subsequent hype made their way into almost every software team in the world. The "Netflix OSS stack" was the coolest thing back then, allowing engineers…
This is an excerpt from an internal document David Mackey and I co-authored in April 2019. The document is excerpted since much of the original doc was about comparing possible approaches to increasing efficency at Twitter, which is mostly information that's meaningless outside of Twitter without a large amount of…
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d...
Lenovo has finally made a smaller version of its X1 Carbon , something I've been looking forward to for years.
`atan2f` is an important but slow trigonometric function. In this article we'll explain how to approximate it, and implement a version 50x faster than `glibc` on batches of inputs.
When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it's not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn't have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out…
While this post is addressed to F# .NET developers, it introduces much wider concepts starting from hardware architecture to overall .NET runtime and JIT compiler optimizations. It shouldn't be a surprise - optimizing the application performance requires us to understand the relationships between our high level code…
A while back there was a thread on one of our company mailing lists about SSH quoting, and I posted a long answer to it. Since then a few people have asked me questions that caused me to reach for it, so I thought it might be helpful if I …
There has been much discussion of using the Rust language in the Linux kernel (for example, here , here , and here ), at the Kangrejos Rust for Linux Workshop ( here , here , and here ) and 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference had a number of sessions on this topic, as did Maintainers Summit . At least…
JSON output must become the norm for application pipelining. Until then, jc can help.
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
Building Brainf∗ck interpreter for the 21 century, with all the best systems design practices in mind. Think of Brainf∗ck-as-a-service cloud solution!
If you're on a version of Windows 11 that is build 22000 or greater, you can ...
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
