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PalmOS on Raspberry Pi
My PalmOS port is making progress on a desktop computer, with keyboard, mouse and a 1920×1080 monitor for display. While that was interesting, I wanted to try a different form factor, one tha…
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What's in the Box?
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week: …or we could just box it. There’s two remarkable things about this sentence. The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and in...
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Android 12 is live in AOSP
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
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Swift Distributed Actors
We’re thrilled to announce a new open-source package for the Swift on Server ecosystem, Swift Distributed Actors, a complete server-oriented cluster library for the upcoming distributed actor language feature!
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The Future Needs Files
For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.
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Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
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Design Issues in LLVM IR
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
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Why use old computers and operating systems?
On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7, which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which at this point is quite old, and Mac OS 9, which is practically ancient. I’d like to talk a bit about why I use such old…
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8 Bits Are Enough for a Version Number
As was pointed out to us stable kernel maintainers last week, the overflow of the .y release number was going to happen soon, and our proposed …
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The Sisyphean Task of DNS Client Config on Linux
The covers a brief history of DNS on Linux systems and what steps Tailscale is taking to ensure it is configured consistently.
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Don’t format a drive of M1 Macs from recovery mode
Because it’s a real mess to reinstall Big Sur!
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OpenZFS – dRAID, Finally
Learn about dRAID in OpenZFS 2.1. Explore its data protection capabilities, distributed hot spares, faster resilvering, and enhanced performance in this article.
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An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
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How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs
This article has now been extensively corrected and modified.
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Porting Doom to the Fastly edge serverless platform
id Software’s DOOM has become one of the most-ported games in history. It felt like a perfect project to port to Compute, built on our serverless compute environment, to experiment with different applications of the product.
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So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
The year is 1983, and several Apple employees visit Brown University, and get some idea of what Universities want in a computer for the coming future. The big buzz of the era was the so called 3M machine:
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Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi
Introducing a series of articles on building a custom Linux installation for the Raspberry Pi, for appliance applications.
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Branchless Coding in Go
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
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Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64
A few months ago I got a report from a service owner that their service was crashing when trying to access certain files stored in tmpfs. This service provid...
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Paxos automatically determined safe and secure
In an important step toward ensuring the protocols that dictate how our networked services operate are safe, secure and running as expected, University of Michigan researchers have automated a technique called formal verification. Their system proves, without any human effort, that one of the mos
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Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years
This week’s paper won the distinguished presentation award at HotOS 2021, and discusses the potential for future innovation in the tool that many use every day - the shell! A previous submission of this paper on Hacker News elicited a number of strong reactions. One reaction was the assertion that there are in fact…
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Demystifying OpenZFS 2.0
Explore the changes and reasons behind OpenZFS 2.0. This article clarifies the transition from feature flags and its impact on FreeBSD 13.
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Fast CSV Processing with SIMD
I recently learned of csvquote , a tool that encodes troublesome CSV characters such that unix tools can correctly process them. It reverses the encoding at the end of the pipeline, recovering the original input. The original implementation handles CSV quotes using the straightforward, naive method. However, there’s a…
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TCP Fast Open? Not so fast
As TCP becomes more important to DNS, overhead is becoming an issue.
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Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a new type of computer
My talk should be on in about an hour and a half from when I post this. A possible next evolutionary step for computers is persistent memory: large capacity non-volatile main memory. With a few terabytes of nonvolatile RAM, who needs an SSD any more? I will sketch out a proposal for how to…
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SeL4 on RISC-V Verified to Binary Code
… and seL4 and RISC-V Foundations form an alliance In June 2020 we announced that the seL4 microkernel, the world’s first operating system (OS) kernel with a machine-checked proof of implemen…