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macOS updates for Apple Silicon Macs are larger than reported
Why some report macOS updates as being more than 1 GB smaller than the figures given here. Don’t believe the size given by softwareupdate.
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Reaching the Unix philosophy's logical extreme with WebAssembly
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Your "simulation" might not need state
The bouncing DVD logo is a fun and easy coding project. Watching Daniel Shiffman code it in p5.js is one of my earliest programming memories. However, the naive solution is far from optimal.
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Parsing time stamps faster with SIMD instructions
In software, it is common to represent time as a time-stamp string. It is usually specified by a time format string. Some standards use the format %Y%m%d%H%M%S meaning that we print the year, the month, the day, the hours, the minutes and the seconds. The current time as I write this blog post would be … Continue…
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A terminal case of Linux
Has this ever happened to you? You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff. That’s a useless use of cat. …oh hey cool bear....
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“csinc”, the AArch64 instruction you didn’t know you wanted
After a long time of not publishing anything and being passive about doing any writing in this blog, I am coming back for … however many articles I can. Today I want to talk about an underrat…
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FreeBSD Jails Containers
FreeBSD networking and containers (Jails) stacks are very mature and provide lots of useful features … yet for some reason these features are not properly advertised by the FreeBSD project &#…
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Optimizing Open Addressing
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
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Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
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Hypervisor Development in Rust
In the ever-evolving field of information security, curiosity and continuous learning drive innovation. This blog series is tailored for those deeply engaged in experimental projects, leveraging Rust’s capabilities to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The focus on Rust, after exploring various programming…
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M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
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Ode to the M1
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
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A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
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Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
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SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
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BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
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ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
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Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
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Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023
A tale how running your own x509 root CA – for internal services – changed in the last 20 years.
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How to train large models on many GPUs? (2021)
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks”
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Sonoma's log gets briefer and more secretive
In Sonoma, some healthy Macs are unable to retain complete logs for 24 hours because of the frequency of entries, and even when privacy is removed, some content is censored.
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Kafka vs. Redpanda performance – do the claims add up?
Apache Kafka has been the most popular open source event streaming system for many years and it continues to grow in popularity. Within the wider ecosystem there are other open source and source available competitors to Kafka such as Apache Pulsar, NATS Streaming, Redis Streams, RabbitMQ and more re
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Unpacking Elixir: Resilience
The nine nines. 99.9999999% of uptime. Whether the AXD301 actually deserves to be held up as a system of nine nines seems debatable. I am not particularly interested in that debate. Erlang has a strong record for reliability and a design intended to help you as a developer and operator achieve your nines. Maybe just…
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Modern CPUs have a backstage cast
If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…
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What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?
Little seems to have changed in CPU cores in M3 chips, if you read reviews. Dig a bit deeper and there are major changes, as explained here.
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Shells are two things
Command languages and scripting languages are and should be different things.