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6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
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Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
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Fifty years of the personal computer operating system
Fifty years ago, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system.
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End-to-end congestion control cannot avoid latency spikes (2022)
What are the fundamental limits of end-to-end congestion control in 5G networks?
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Significant performance and correctness improvements to the kernel
The Redox official website
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vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
Using libblkio, QEMU Storage Daemon, and VDUSE
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Limitations of frame pointer unwinding
Explore 3 limitations of using frame pointers for stack unwinding and profiling in Linux that are often overlooked, plus possible future alternatives.
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What part of Rust compilation is the bottleneck?
Rust compilation times is an ongoing topic that generates many discussions online1. Most people don’t really care about what exactly takes time when compiling Rust program; they just want it to be faster in general. But sometimes, you can see people pointing fingers at specific culprits, like LLVM or the borrow…
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I found an 8 years old bug in Xorg
Let me set the right expectations first. This bug I found is actually not that complicated, it's very straightforward once you see what's going on. But I still think the process it took me to uncover this bug could be interesting. It's also kind of interesting that a simple bug stayed undiscovered for so long. I will…
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Making a parallel Rust workload 10x faster with (or without) Rayon
In a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores.Disappointingly, my benchmarks showed that this only provided a 2x speedup for my workload, on a computer with 8 CPU threads.Worse, the total “user” and “system” times…
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Waiting for many things at once with io_uring
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, waiting for any number…
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Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
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GhostRace: Exploiting and mitigating speculative race conditions
Exploiting and Mitigating Speculative Race Conditions GhostRace: CVE-2024-2193 Race conditions arise when multiple threads attempt to access a shared resource without proper synchronization, often leading to vulnerabilities such as concurrent use-after-free. To mitigate their occurrence, operating systems rely on…
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Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition
The previous iteration of this article was too technical, too long, and contained a lot of controversial points, so I've been thinking for a long time about rewriting it completely, making it accessible to the non-technical folks, and exposing the deeper core issues that still make Linux a questionable match for the…
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Inline Assembly Dangers
Resolving PS2SDK Soft Reset Issues
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Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)
Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine. However, if your project anyway exposes RPCs for public APIs or would benefit from a schema-based serialisation layer it makes sense to use only one tool that combines these—also for IPC. Microservices for…
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Fast Shadow Stacks for Go
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
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Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 10: RTC
I’m going to start this post off with the obligatory list of links to the previous parts in the series if you’re new here and are interested in seeing the full story: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and 9 . This is the tale of how I upgraded my Chumby 8 to run a modern Linux kernel.
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Hyprland Crash Course
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating.
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Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
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Flatcar: OS Innovation with Systemd-Sysext
The current state of systemd-sysext in Flatcar and the next steps
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QEMU AioContext removal and how it was done
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
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Why do systems fail? Tandem NonStop system and fault tolerance
Explore Tandem NonStop architecture principles and their relevance to high availability in software systems like Elixir, Gleam, and Erlang.
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Build a simple LSM-Tree storage engine in a week
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
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OpenBSD is a cozy operating system
With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.
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The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.