If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.
Or: How JPEG Screenshots Defeated Our Beautiful H.264 WebCodecs Pipeline
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices …
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
Benjamin Spector* , Jordan Juravsky* , Stuart Sul* , Dylan Lim , Owen Dugan , Simran Arora , Chris Ré
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
Around the turn of the century we started to get a bigger need for high capacity web servers. For example there was the C10k problem paper.
How difficult could it really be?
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
A deep dive into Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel architecture, tracing its evolution from Mach and BSD roots to powering macOS, iOS, and Apple Silicon. This post explores the hybrid kernel’s design, its adaptation to new hardware and security paradigms, and why XNU remains a uniquely resilient and scalable foundation…
A detailed walkthrough of the Linux boot process from power button to kernel initialization
This post explains our recent effort to improve JSON.stringify performance
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
Initial kernel and subsystem support for new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 posted for review. Learn what’s in the patches and how you can start working with them.
This RFD describes futurelock : a type of deadlock where a resource owned by Future A is required for another Future B to proceed, while the Task responsible for both Futures is no longer polling A . Futurelock is a particularly subtle risk in writing asynchronous Rust.
Take an interactive journey through the history of IO devices, and learn how IO device latency affects performance.
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
Dmitry.GR: Interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips
I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest tells you how close…
In this post I go through the journey of overusing Kubernetes and how systemd can actually do most of what I use it for.
I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…
Andrew Kelley famously (or infamously, depending on your views) said "the compiler is too damn slow, that's why we have bugs." 1
NATS is a popular streaming system. Producers publish messages to streams , and consumers subscribe to those streams, fetching messages from them. Regular NATS streams are allowed to drop messages. However, NATS has a subsystem called JetStream , which uses the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data among nodes…
Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to:
Boost PostgreSQL full-text search speed by 50x with simple optimizations. Use VectorChord-BM25 to accelerate and better BM25 ranking in postgres.
The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two...
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
