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Microsoft confirms Exchange Year 2022 problem
[German]Exchange servers (on-premises) have had woldwide a Year 2022 problem since January 1 (00:00 UTC), because mails are no longer transported due to a “date error”. Meanwhile…
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Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
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Hot-code reloading on macOS/arm64 with Zig
Jakub Konka's weblog about programming, game theory, maths, and more.
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Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die
Privileged ports were a security feature in the days of dumb terminals, in the age of the World Wide Web, they are a security vulnerability.
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Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
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Year 2038 problem is still alive and well
Largely because of a single code snippet used by many.
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Hardening macOS
Quick and easy guide for securing macOS systems, for both laymen and security enthusiasts. Last updated for Golden Gate.
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LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
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Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
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Founding Uber SRE
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
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How the clipboard works
Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious.
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Your computer is a distributed system
Many have observed that today's computers are distributed systems implementing the abstraction of the shared-memory multiprocessor. The wording in the title is from the 2009 paper " Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? ". Some points from that and other sources:
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Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
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tolower() in bulk at speed
DNS servers often have to convert DNS names to their canonical lower case form. BIND has to do so a bit more than most because it tries to preserve the case of DNS names rather than canonicalizing them.
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Writing systemd units that stop gracefully before shutdown
systemd Shutdown Units
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Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
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The FreeBSD/Firecracker Platform
I started working on this on June 20th mainly out of curiosity: I had heard that Firecracker had PVH boot support (which was in fact mistaken!) and I knew that FreeBSD could boot in PVH mode from Xen, so I wondered just how hard it would be to get FreeBSD up and running. Not impossible, as it turned out, but a bit…
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Fallacies of distributed systems
Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
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Uxn is a virtual machine with 32 instructions
By Devine Lu Linvega
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Use fast data algorithms (2021)
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
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Understanding Google’s File System (2020)
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)
You only need to learn a little bit of queueing theory before you start getting that ecstatic “everything is connected!” high that good math always evokes. So many damn things follow th…
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C Runtime Overhead (2015)
What do you do when libc is your bottleneck? If the total runtime of your process is under 10ms, most of this time (depending on your hardware) is spent waiting for the linker and C runtime to set things up. If you compare this to the Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know , it falls right above "disk seek" and…
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My Unholy Battle with a Rock64
I’ve got this rock64, which is an aarch64 board comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with 4 gigs of ram. For years I’ve wanted to put a distribution on here that doesn’t have a premade image available, mainly because out of all the options on that page I don’t actually like any of them. Well, except NetBSD, but NetBSD…
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Notes on BPF and eBPF
Notes on BPF & eBPF