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A distributed systems reading list
An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals
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Let's compile like it's 1992 (2014)
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
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Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft?
This is a story about the messy state of Microsoft’s DirectX shader compiler, and trying to wrangle it into a nicer experience for game developers. In some respects, building the DXC compiler better than how Microsoft does.
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ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack
ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack to bring Google AI, innovations, and features faster to users.Over the last 13 years, we’ve evolve…
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Adding 16 kb page size to Android
Android 15 has been refactored to support using 16 KB page sizes, and file systems like EROFS and F2FS have been made compatible.
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AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted
How a modern AVX instruction shares a similar design with a 1985 blitter chip, by Arnaud Carré
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The journey of an internet packet: Exploring networks with traceroute
This article explains the mechanics behind traceroute, from IP headers and TTL fields to ICMP messages. Learn why traceroute is a crucial tool for network diagnostics, how it differs from ping, and how to interpret its output. Ideal for network administrators, IT professionals, and curious users looking to understand…
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A 100x speedup with unsafe Python
We're going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using "unsafe Python." Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it's a bit similar, and I'm not sure what else to call it... you'll see. It's not something you'd use in most Python code, but it's handy on occasion, and I think it shows "the nature of Python” from…
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A Real Life Off-by-One Error
The Championnats d’Europe d’Escalade (climbing) in Villars-sur-Ollon has just finished. I couldn’t make it to all the events, but did see the finals of the “Speed” event. It’s a series of head-to-head elimination races up a 15m tall wall, resulting in an eventual victor after enough rounds.
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A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)
A Pretty Map of the European Power Grid
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Dumping Memory to Bypass BitLocker on Windows 11
Memory-Dump-UEFI is a UEFI application for dumping the contents of RAM.
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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
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Coroutines in C (2000)
Structuring a large program is always a difficult job. One of the particular problems that often comes up is this: if you have a piece of code producing data, and another piece of code consuming it, which should be the caller and which should be the callee?
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The server chose violence
Hubris's oddest syscall
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Gaining kernel code execution on an MTE-enabled Pixel 8
In this post, I’ll look at CVE-2023-6241, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU that allows a malicious app to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and root on an Android phone. I’ll show how this vulnerability can be exploited even when Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), a powerful mitigation, is enabled on the device.
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The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t
(please note that there’s a correction at the bottom) In the Overview of cross-architecture portability problems, I have dedicated a section to the problems resulting from use of 32-bit time_…
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How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months
Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years. Here’s why we decided it was worth undertaking, and how we moved a majority of our core services.
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Seconds Since the Epoch
This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch , which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.
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HTTP/2 Continuation Flood: Technical Details
Preface In October 2023 I learned about HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack, dubbed “the largest DDoS attack to date”. I didn’t have deep knowledge of HTTP/2 back then. I knew its basics like frames or HPACK but I was focusing more on HTTP/1.1 protocol and programming languages vulnerabilities. I decided to dedicate time to…
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A Simple ELF
The Ivory Tower is a blog about software engineering and development philosophy by Anders Sundman.
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Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
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Systemd by Example (2021)
The first article in a series where I explore aspects of systemd by creating small examples with the help of containers.
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Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution
Google networking leaders reflect on the milestones that led to Jupiter supporting 13 petabits per second bandwidth, and what comes next.