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What Makes System Calls Expensive: A Linux Internals Deep Dive
An explanation of how Linux handles system calls on x86-64 and why they show up as expensive operations in performance profiles
Sep 16
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
33
3
August 2025
How to Leverage the CPU’s Micro-Op Cache for Faster Loops
Measuring, analyzing, and optimizing loops using Linux perf, Top-Down Microarchitectural Analysis, and the CPU’s micro-op cache
Aug 15
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
18
45:32
Big O vs Hardware: Better Complexity ≠ Better Performance
Why Your O(log n) Algorithm Might Lose to O(n)
Aug 3
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
49
July 2025
x86 Assembly Exercise #1: Toy kill Program (Solution)
A step-by-step walkthrough of the toy kill program using raw Linux syscalls.
Jul 19
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
6
8:42
Understanding Registers and Data Movement in x86-64 Assembly
A hands-on guide to general-purpose registers and data movement in x86-64
Jul 16
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
12
A Programmer’s Guide to x86-64 Assembly (Series Overview)
Welcome to my ongoing series on x86-64 assembly programming, designed for programmers who want to peel back the abstraction and understand how code…
Jul 16
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
10
2
June 2025
Why This Python Performance Trick Doesn’t Matter Anymore
A deep dive into Python’s name resolution, bytecode, and how CPython 3.11 quietly made a popular optimization irrelevant.
Jun 28
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
24
Making System Calls in x86-64 Assembly
Watch now | Privilege levels, syscall conventions, and how assembly code talks to the Linux kernel
Jun 16
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
17
31:44
One Law to Rule Them All: The Iron Law of Software Performance
A systems-level reasoning model for understanding why optimizations succeed or fail.
Jun 8
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
44
May 2025
Debugging X86-64 Assembly with GDB
Watch now (20 mins) | Learn how to inspect registers, step through instructions, and investigate crashes using GDB.
May 26
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
30
4
19:40
Building (and Breaking) Your First X86 Assembly Program
We build a minimal X86 assembly program, run it… and hit a crash. But that crash is exactly what makes this program worth writing.
May 16
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
11
3
The System-Level Foundation of Assembly
Tracing how the CPU, OS, and ELF format shape the structure of your assembly code
May 5
•
Abhinav Upadhyay
26
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