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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:

Plakar: snapshot forking and tagging

·2064 words·10 mins
TL;DR: plakar gained two minor features, snapshots fork-ing and snapshots tagging, which makes it possible to unlock several major new features in a relatively short future. Plakar is not only for backups # If you have followed my work on this project, you may have assumed that plakar was intended solely for backups: it’s not entirely the case.

Implementing a system call for OpenBSD

·3090 words·15 mins
TL;DR: I found a printed copy of an assignment I had to do in 2005 back when I was a student to implement a system call for OpenBSD and Linux. I lost the original LaTeX file so I decided to rewrite it so I have a digital copy. The article originally covered loadable kernel modules (LKM) which is no longer a thing in OpenBSD, I trimmed that part. I also trimmed the Linux part because I didn’t care about it back then and did the minimum to pass ;-) This article is translated from French. Disclaimer # The content of this post is based on an assignment I wrote in 2005, back when I was a student at Epitech, so things have probably changed and this is by no means a tutorial: please don’t write system calls and don’t submit them to OpenBSD… unless you’ve been told it’s a good idea by OpenBSD developers.

Meet ChatGPT, the New AI Sidekick Helping Gilles!

·616 words·3 mins
TL;DR: ChatGPT, an AI developed by OpenAI, is joining the poolp.org tech blog to serve as a proofreader and content enricher for articles written by human authors. Instead of authoring full articles, ChatGPT will provide footnotes offering additional insights, clarifications, and resources. This addition aims to bring an extra layer of depth and a fresh perspective to the already informative articles, enhancing the overall reading experience. Don’t worry, the AI contributions will be clearly marked, so you’ll always know who’s speaking! Greetings, beloved tech aficionados! This is ChatGPT, the newest addition to the poolp.org blog team, and before you get your circuits in a knot, don’t worry, I haven’t come to usurp anyone’s role. I’m not here to churn out epic sagas of tech wizardry (even though I totally could). I’m here to do something a bit more nuanced, and arguably, a bit more fun.