Sparse files are common in Linux/Unix and are also supported by Windows (e.g. NTFS) and macOSes (e.g. HFS+). Sparse files uses storage efficiently when the files have a lot of holes (contiguous ranges of bytes having the value of zero) by storing only metadata for the holes instead of using real disk blocks. They are
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Category: Linux
Tutorials and tips on Linux system configuration and administration, and software for Linux systems.
How to Add a File Based Swap for Linux
Posted onWe may want to add some swap space for a Linux box while only find that all disk space is partitioned and mounted. Some partition has large available free space. For such cases, we may not want to change the partition allocation. The solution may be to add a file based swap for Linux as
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How to disable the fastestmirror yum plugin in CentOS 7 Linux?
Posted onHow to disable the fastmirror yum plugin in CentOS 7 Linux? The fastestmirror function of yum is provided by the package `yum-plugin-fastestmirror`. However, because `yum` depends on it, the `yum-plugin-fastestmirror` package can not be removed. If you try to remove it, `yum` will report failures like. # yum remove yum-plugin-fastestmirror Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Resolving Dependencies
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How to find the disk where root / is on in Bash on Linux?
Posted onQuestion: how to find the disk where the Linux’s root(/) is on in Bash? The root may be on a LVM volume or on a raw disk. 2 cases: One example: # df -hT | grep /$ /dev/sda4 ext4 48G 32G 14G 71% / For another example: # df -hT | grep /$ /dev/mapper/fedora-root ext4
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How to disable DHCP in dnsmasq on Linux?
Posted onHow to disable the DHCP service in dnsmasq on Linux? That is, to leave only dnsmasq’s DNS service. The `/etc/dnsmasq.conf` file may have lines that enable DHCP service of dnsmasq. By default, the DHCP is disabled in dnsmasq (check one example dnsmasq.conf file). To disable DHCP service in dnsmasq, in `/etc/dnsmasq.conf`, remove or disable the
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Getting Hostname in Bash in Linux
Posted onIn Bash, how to get the hostname of the node running the program? In Bash, you can get the hostname of the node in at least 2 ways: Use the variable $HOSTNAME. Get the hostname by command hostname. Get the content of /proc/sys/kernel/hostname Example: $ echo $HOSTNAME host01 $ hs=`hostname` $ echo $hs host01 $
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Allowing root Access to NFS Directories
Posted onFor local filesystems, root usually has full access (read/write) to directories/files inside of it. But for NFS directory mounted from network, root usually has no permission to write to directories or files within the NFS directory. How to make root act similarly in an NFS directory to the behavior in local directories? The reason that
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How to deactivate a LVM logical volume on Linux?
Posted onHow to deactivate a LVM logical volume activated by #vgchange -aay on Linux You may need to make a LVM volume group inactive and thus unknown to the kernel. To deactivate a volume group, use the -a (–activate) argument of the vgchange command. To deactivates the volume group vg, use this command # vgchange -a
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Decrypting a Password Protected RSA Private Key
Posted onI got a password protected RSA private key with headers like (I have the password): —–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—– Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED DEK-Info: AES-256-CBC,… How to decrypt a password protected RSA private key? You can use the openssl command to decrypt the key: openssl rsa -in /path/to/encrypted/key -out /paht/to/decrypted/key For example, if you have a encrypted
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Where Does Evolution Save Its Data and Configuration Files on Linux?
Posted onEvolution is a great personal information management tool that provides Email, address book and calendar tools. Evolution provides many enterprise friendly feature such as native support to Microsoft Exchange connectivity for Emails, address books and calendars. Evolution uses various ways including plain files and dconf configuration systems. This post will give an introduction to the
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A Beginners’ Guide to x86-64 Instruction Encoding
Posted onThe encoding of x86 and x86-64 instructions is well documented in Intel or AMD’s manuals. However, they are not quite easy for beginners to start with to learn encoding of the x86-64 instructions. In this post, I will give a list of useful manuals for understanding and studying the x86-64 instruction encoding, a brief introduction
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How To Debug Linux Kernel With Less Efforts
Posted onIntroduction In general, if we want to debug Linux Kernel, there are lots of tools such as Linux Perf, Kprobe, BCC, Ktap, etc, and we can also write kernel modules, proc subsystems or system calls for some specific debugging aims. However, if we have to instrument kernel to achieve our goals, usually we would not
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USB Standards and Supports in Linux
Posted onThe USB standards have evolved to 3.1 and the supported throughput have been increased too. On Linux, the support to USB standards are following the standards development. In this post, we will survey the standards that common hardware support and the support in Linux. USB standards USB 2.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB_2.0 Speed: <= 60MB/s, or 480 Mbps
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Building and Installing Linux Kernel from the Source Code in an Existing Linux OS
Posted onBuilding Linux kernel may sound a complex and geek-only thing. However, as Linux kernel itself has much less depended tools/packages compared to other software packages, it is quite easy to compile, build and install a Linux kernel from the source code in an existing Linux OS. Building Linux kernel is needed if you need to
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How does linux kernel collect task stats data
Posted onMotivation Recently, I find it is hard to know the percentage of time that one process uses to wait for synchronous I/O (eg, read, etc). One way is to use the taskstats API provided by Linux Kernel [1]. However, for this way, the precision may be one problem. With this problem, I dig into Linux
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Vim Tutorial for Beginners: vimtutor
Posted onThere are many Vim tutorials and Vim tips on the Web. However, I find the vimtutor provides the best tutorial among those so far as I found on the Web while the vimtutor seems usually reachable from a terminal which is not obviously known to Vim beginners who are usually Linux beginners too. This page
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x-data-plane feature in QEMU/KVM
Posted onAbstract In systems, sometimes, we use one global lock to keep synchronization among different threads. This principle also happens in QEMU/KVM (http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page) system. However, this may cause lock contention problem. The performance/scalability of whole system will be decreased. In order to solve this problem in QEMU/KVM, x-data-plane feature is designed/implemented, which the high-level idea is
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The length of timeslices for processes under CFS process scheduling algorithm in Linux Kernel
Posted onAbstract As is known, CFS (Completely Fair Scheduling) is a famous process scheduling algorithm in Linux Kernel but there is no convenient way for developers to get the timeslices of processes if CFS is chosen. In this article, I will introduce one way to hack the timeslices of process easily for CFS in Linux Kernel.
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How sched_min_granularity_ns, sched_latency_ns and sched_wakeup_granularity_ns in CFS affect the timeslice of processes
Posted onAbstract Currently, the most famous process scheduling algorithm in Linux Kernel is Completely Fair Scheduling (CFS) algorithm. The core idea of CFS is to let each process share the same proportional CPU resources to run so that it is fair to each process. In this article, I will introduce how sched_min_granularity_ns and sched_latency_ns work internal
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How migration thread works inside of Linux Kernel
Posted onAbstract In computer systems, resources have to be balanced so that the performance will be better based on the same hardware. In Linux Kernel system, we will see some migration kernel threads running as daemons to do this kind of jobs as follows. In this article, we will discuss how Linux Kernel balances its hardware/software
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