I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…
UPDATE: This blog post has been updated based on feedback from Reddit and Hacker News. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id...
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,
How we rolled out zstandard and other improvements across our gateway cluster to reduce the amount of bandwidth that’s used by our clients.
Discover the power of Snapdragon X Elite with upstreamed Linux kernel support. Explore areas of focus and unlock new potential with Snapdragon Linux today.
Bartek Wydrowski, Google Research; Robert Kleinberg, Google Research and Cornell; Stephen M. Rumble, Google (YouTube); Aaron Archer, Google Research
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
In this post we look at the impact of a new feature of Ruby 3.4 on Shopify’s monolith.
Building Surfgrad, a high-performant, WebGPU-powered autograd library
This week's Internet cable cuts in the Baltic Sea have been widely reported, even as attempts to understand their cause and impact continue. We turn to RIPE Atlas to provide a preliminary analysis of these events and ask to what extent the Internet in the region has been resilient to them.
Apple’s M2 chip uses a newer version of the CPU core instruction set. This increases its capability, thus how well it will cope with future apps and macOS, compared with the M1.
Musings about async await again and why I think virtual threads
Userspace wireguard is fun!
The Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team is excited to announce the Hyperlight project, an open-source Rust library you can use to create very small VMs for embedded functions. Learn more.
Welcome to Waqas' blog
Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio walk through the performance optimizations Antonio when working on Zed's Rope data structure before they then pair on adding more optimizations
Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent malware employing several sophisticated techniques
Welcome back to FOSS Fridays! This week, I’m covering a real pickle. I’m acutely aware of the flames this blog post will inspire, but I feel it is important to write nevertheless. I volunteer my ti…
In this post, I will talk about the importance of small optimizations that can provide a lot of performance improvements.
A few years ago, I wrote a "state of things" blog post about Wayland on NetBSD . It's only natural that I should do one about X11, which is used by far more people to get a graphical environment on NetBSD.
A few years ago, I have blogged about my approach to sandboxing less-trusted applications that I have to or want to run on my main machine. The approach has changed since then, so it is tim...
It has been eighteen years of libcurl ABI stability.
This blog post summarises a new garbage collection algorithm called Mark-Scavenge, which highlights how using reachability as a proxy for liveness in moving GCs leads to unnecessary data movement and how we can address this. This work is from the latest paper within the research collaboration between Oracle and…
I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…
How we cut build times by 50% and shipped a solution for scale.
In the context of out-of-order microarchitectures, I was under the impression that execution units remain occupied until the µop they’re processing is complete. This is often not the case.
An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.
