Research Notes: the July 2026 Update

This site was originally curated around 2016–2018. In July 2026 the entire collection was re-researched and rebuilt. This page documents how the research was done and what it found, so readers can judge the update’s reliability. The file-by-file changelog with rationale is in CHANGES.md in the repository.

Process

1. Inventory. Every reference on the old one-page site (~85 links across 20 sections) was extracted and grouped into five research areas: server hardware & CPUs; networking/NICs/kernel bypass; Linux OS tuning; FPGA, time sync & measurement tools; software engineering & languages.
2. Link audit. Each legacy URL was fetched and classified alive / moved (redirect) / dead / hijacked. For every dead or moved link we searched for the canonical current location, an official successor document, or — for classics with no successor — a Wayback Machine capture.
3. State-of-the-art survey. For each area, web research (vendor documentation, conference talks, benchmark disclosures, practitioner blogs, kernel changelogs) established what changed between ~2018 and mid-2026, with dates and numbers.
4. Reference selection. New references were admitted only if (a) the URL was verified reachable, (b) the content is authoritative or uniquely instructive, and (c) it earns its place for a stated audience level (beginner/intermediate/advanced). Every admitted reference got a 3–5 sentence summary on a summaries page, linked beside its source link.
5. Reorganization. The flat link list became: a curated reference list by topic (home), per-topic summary pages, and a single beginner-to-expert guide that gives the whole field a narrative structure.

Caveat: a few vendor pages (docs.redhat.com, intel.com, cisco.com, hpe.com, STAC) block automated fetchers and were verified via search indexing and mirrors; they load normally in browsers.

Key findings by area

The vendor map was redrawn by acquisitions

• Solarflare → Xilinx (2019) → AMD (2022). The dominant trading-NIC franchise now ships as AMD Solarflare; the current flagship is the X4 series (Oct 2025). OpenOnload was open-sourced in 2021 at github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload; openonload.org and support.solarflare.com are gone.
• Mellanox → NVIDIA (2020). All mellanox.com documentation links died; docs moved to NVIDIA portals. The VMA kernel-bypass library was superseded by XLIO; Rivermax/NEIO FastSockets is the 2025 finance offering.
• Exablaze → Cisco (2019), then exit. ExaNIC became Cisco Nexus SmartNIC (maintenance mode); Cisco end-of-saled the entire ex-Exablaze ULL switch line in April 2023, leaving Arista 7130 (ex-Metamako) as the de facto layer-1/ULL switching platform.
• HPE retired its overclocked “Trade and Match” servers; boutique vendors (Blackcore, Hypertec CIARA) now own the overclocked-server niche.
• Smaller moves: Real Logic (Aeron) acquired by Adaptive (2022), repo moved to aeron-io; Enyx acquired by Exegy (2022); Corvil acquired by Pico (2019); STAC acquired by ISG (2020).

Technology state of the art (mid-2026)

• Tick-to-trade tiers: tuned software with kernel bypass ~1–2 µs; FPGA tens–hundreds of ns, with the STAC-T0 record at 13.9 ns (Exegy + AMD Alveo UL3524, 2024); ASICs at the deterministic frontier.
• PREEMPT_RT merged into mainline Linux 6.12 (Nov 2024) after ~20 years out-of-tree; kernel-rt is included in standard RHEL since 9.0. Modern isolation practice is nohz_full + rcu_nocbs + IRQ steering (bare isolcpus is insufficient); tuned’s cpu-partitioning profile automates it; rtla (kernel 5.17+) is the new jitter-diagnosis tool; observability is eBPF-first.
• CPUs: AMD EPYC 9005 F-series (9575F) and X3D parts with 3D V-Cache; Intel Xeon 6 with Latency Optimized Mode (+17% measured) and SST-BF guaranteed-fast cores; single-socket settled as the latency architecture; core-to-core latency is now a first-class selection metric.
• Time sync: IEEE 1588-2019 (PTP v2.1) is the baseline; White Rabbit became its High Accuracy profile and is offered by Deutsche Börse in co-location; Meta open-sourced its PTP stack and the OCP Time Card; MiFID II RTS 25 (100 µs / 1 µs granularity) still drives requirements, with its successor RTS in draft.
• Languages: C++ canon refreshed (Optiver’s David Gross: Meeting C++ 2022, CppCon 2024 keynote); Rust reached effective latency parity with a maturing ecosystem (Databento, 2025); Java consolidated on Disruptor/Chronicle/Aeron with pauseless GC now free via generational ZGC (JDK 21+).

Link audit results

Of the ~85 legacy references: roughly one third were dead or effectively dead (404, retired portals, empty JS shells), several more silently redirected to marketing homepages, and one — Dmitry Vyukov’s 1024cores.net — was domain-hijacked and now serves spam (content survives at the official Google Sites mirror, which we now link). Notable dead links and their replacements:

What was removed

Some legacy entries were removed rather than replaced, with reasons recorded in CHANGES.md: content-farm or Q&A links that no longer add value next to better sources (Quora architecture threads, Tom’s Hardware jitter FAQ, quantlabs posts), 2012-era FPGA vendor pages that no longer exist or describe long-obsolete products (NetFPGA-10G, Nallatech, Xeon+FPGA prototypes), superseded tuning posts (2013 multi-queue SMP article, OpenBSD-centric calomel), and marketing pages with no durable technical content (Fujitsu optical brochure, IBM/Solarflare 2011 whitepaper, “faster than 10G” blogspot). The scrubbed Meanderful blog (Matt Hurd) is remembered via the Wayback Machine in CHANGES.md only.

Methodology notes

Research was performed with parallel web-research agents (one per area), each instructed to verify every recommended URL by fetching it and to return link status, dated state-of-the-art facts, and candidate references with summaries and difficulty levels. Their raw findings were then cross-checked where areas overlapped (e.g. Rigtorp’s guide, STAC records and core-to-core-latency tools surfaced independently in multiple areas — a good sign of canonicity) and edited into the pages you see. Facts carry dates in the text so future readers can judge staleness; this page itself should be re-verified around mid-2027.