kernel tuning

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Git Merge 2016 talk on how the Linux kernel is developed, how fast it moves, and how git and email workflows keep it manageable. He is the stable kernel maintainer.

Kees Cook of Google gives a Linux Foundation talk on the Kernel Self Protection Project, which aims to harden Linux against attackers. He surveys threats, the state of available defensive technologies and a year of community progress.

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.

The Plasticity creator explains what a geometry kernel is and compares commercial options C3D, ACIS, and Parasolid, describing his months of research and why he chose as he did.

Andrew Tanenbaum's FOSDEM 2010 talk on MINIX 3, a microkernel OS built for high reliability and security. It shows how the system detects and recovers from device driver crashes, and addresses microkernel performance concerns.

Adam Neely tests the claims for tuning to A=432 Hz by trying the unusual tuning systems that its proponents' numerology requires. He compares how they sound against standard tuning and temperaments.

A one-minute clip of Jacob Collier tuning a piano, remarking that it is not in tune at all. It touches on his views on equal temperament and tuning.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linaro keynote on contributing to the Linux kernel, explaining why maintainers prefer upstreamed code and how they view contributions.

Bryan Cantrill's illumos Day 2014 talk on running Linux containers on an illumos kernel via LX-branded zones. He covers emulating Linux syscalls on SmartOS and compares Linux and Solaris-derived systems.

A short demonstration comparing just intonation with equal temperament, played so you can hear how the tuning compromise changes intervals and chords. It includes a Bach prelude played in both tunings.

Kent Overstreet's Linux Foundation talk about writing a filesystem in Rust. Its Q&A segment, where Rust-for-Linux developers ask about interface semantics, became widely cited.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Paul Turner of Google presents kernel interfaces for user-level scheduling of real threads, aiming at a uniform synchronous programming model across C++, Java, Go and Python. It introduces the switchto-style system calls behind Google's fibers.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.

Classical guitarist Brandon Acker shows how guitars with tied-on gut frets, as used 300 years ago, can play more in tune than modern fixed metal frets. He demonstrates microtonal and meantone tunings on a guitar with movable frets.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

A short clip from the 2013 LinuxCon Linux Kernel Panel in which Linus Torvalds is asked about being approached to insert a backdoor into Linux. He answers no verbally while nodding yes, which became a much-shared moment.

Jérôme Petazzoni explains how Linux containers are built from kernel features like cgroups, namespaces and SELinux. He demonstrates putting the pieces together by hand to make a container and compares runtimes and approaches like jails and zones.

Andrej Karpathy walks through how GPT assistants are trained, from tokenization and pretraining to supervised finetuning and RLHF, and gives practical prompting strategies and a view of the tooling ecosystem.

Linus Torvalds is interviewed at Aalto University in 2012, followed by an audience Q&A. He talks about Linux, kernel development and the desktop, and about Nvidia support. The Q&A has a well-known moment where he is blunt about Nvidia.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

Tolgahan Cogulu demonstrates a fixed-fret microtonal guitar, playing music that uses notes between the usual twelve semitones. The channel is dedicated to his microtonal guitar designs.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

The official demo video from Be, Inc. showing BeOS running multiple videos, media applications and a responsive desktop on 1990s hardware.

A Microsoft Build 2019 session in which the WSL team explains the new WSL 2 architecture, which runs a real Linux kernel alongside Windows on a hypervisor. It covers faster file performance, Linux file access from Windows and better application support.

Linus Tech Tips builds a Linux PC together with Linus Torvalds, who talks through parts selection, kernel development and some of his side projects. The conversation also touches on AI in kernel work.

An episode of the BSD Now podcast in which Bryan Cantrill joins the hosts to rant about Linux interfaces, alongside the week's BSD headlines. The conversation also touches on containers and related systems topics.

Gernot Heiser presents seL4, a microkernel with a mathematical proof connecting security properties to the binary code, and explains what its open-sourcing means for users. It covers its roles as a microkernel, separation kernel and hypervisor.

GitHub interviews Linus Torvalds on twenty years of Git, from its creation in about ten days as a Linux kernel tool to its role in modern software development. He discusses technical decisions, community contributions and the project's philosophy.

Louis Rossmann examines a 2012 MacBook Pro logic board that Apple refurbished for GPU failures and that failed again. He criticizes the quality of Apple's authorized repair work and argues for right to repair.

A short clip of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger and telling the company off over its Linux support. It is the well-known soundbite from a Q&A.

Chandler Carruth shows how to squeeze more performance out of already-optimized C++ code, covering how the CPU executes it. The talk goes into pipelining, branch prediction and speculative execution using benchmarks.

Yannic Kilcher explains how he trained a language model on three years of 4chan's /pol/ board and let it post on the site. He evaluates how good the model was and discusses the ethics and fallout.

A minutephysics video explaining why a piano cannot be perfectly tuned, comparing equal temperament with just intonation and the math of harmonics.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

A short TFiR clip in which Linus Torvalds explains his view that respect should be earned rather than given, in defense of his blunt and insulting style.