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I’m Gilles Chehade — author of OpenSMTPD, CTO of Plakar. This is my personal blog: systems, code, music, and the occasional detour.

I also take short consulting engagements — architecture review, technical due diligence, mail infrastructure — through aljuna.tech.

Recent

OpenBSD 8.0 on a Scaleway Instance

·2303 words·11 mins
TL;DR: Every few years I want to install OpenBSD at Scaleway… but they don’t support OpenBSD and I need to find a way to install regardless. Here we go again… # Since early 2010, I’ve been a regular customer of Dedibox then Scaleway, particularly because they’re very geeky and also because I’ve always personally known people working there which proves helpful at times :-)

2023, a retrospective.

·965 words·5 mins
TL;DR: A personal retrospective of 2023 2023 was a rough year # I usually enjoy doing these yearly posts, looking back at what I did and planning what I’ll do, but 2023 was a rough year. I’m glad it’s over.

Plakar: an avalanche of changes

·2625 words·13 mins
TL;DR: Significant refactoring to improve its performance, implemented read and write semaphores to throttle chunkers and reduce memory usage, introduced a repository index and packfiles to decrease the number of I/O operations, also intrioduced a new HTTP storage backend. A ton of refactors # I’ve done so much work on plakar in the past few weeks that I don’t even know what to begin with…

Plakar: a TON of changes

·3855 words·19 mins
TL;DR: TL;DR: a lot of work in plakar, but also on CDC and index optimization. Optimized go-fastcdc # I ran into a benchmark which included my implementation of the FastCDC algorithm, and it made me realise that it was not on par with alternative implementations: