Plan 9 was intended to be Unix, done better. It preemptively replaced a lot of what we now bodge together with virtual machines, containers, and even microkernels, and it did it more simply and cleanly. But it wasn’t compatible enough to replace its ancestor. With off-the-shelf existing 21st century tech, we can fix that.

source: fosdem2024

What happens inside the cpu? how things get delayed...

Writing is key to have impact in large organizations. As a senior software engineer chances are that writing is the most important skill you have to acquire in order to increase your scope beyond the team and advance your career.

This article contains some learnings that have helped the author to become better and more productive as a writer over the past 15 years.

A curated list of openbsd’s innovations

Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier....

source: dragonflydigest

Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream “way to do it” without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it’s time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what’s going on.

a. Learn to learn
b. Learn to question things
c. Acquire the permanent habit of learning

* Décongestion de réseaux
* Débuggage de logiciels
* Protection contre les virus
* Protection contre les tentatives d’intrusions
* Restructuration de services
* Partage de connexion Internet sans connexion
* Suppression aléatoire de compte utilisateur
* Protection anti-spoofing basée sur les adresses MAC
* Définition de politique de gestion et de sécurité aléatoire
* Elimination systématique des fichiers de log (journaux)
* Protection contre les DoS et DDoS grâce au système exclusif InUranus®
* Support de IPoT
* Rend vos données importantes accessibles à tout moment et à tout endroit
* Débloque les claviers qui se bl

source: CaptainPatate

In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications.

source: https://www.usenix.org

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

In short, the argument goes, the ability to write scheduling policies in BPF greatly lowers the difficulty of experimenting with new approaches to scheduling. Both our workloads and the systems they run on have become much more complex since the completely fair scheduler was introduced; experimentation is needed to develop scheduling algorithms that are suited to current systems. The BPF scheduling class allows that experimentation in a safe manner without even needing to reboot the test machine. BPF-written schedulers can also improve performance for niche workloads that may not be worth supporting in the mainline kernel and are much easier to deploy to a large fleet of systems.

source: https://lwn.net

source: queue.acm.org

Monolith vs microservices ... small server vs big server...

We have all gotten so familiar with virtualization and abstractions between our software and the servers that run it. These days, “serverless” computing is all the rage, and even “bare metal” is a class of virtual machine. However, every piece of software runs on a server. Since we now live in a world of virtualization, most of these servers are a lot bigger and a lot cheaper than we actually think.

source: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_big_should_a_programming_language_be.html