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 […]
Posts on Linux
Tutorials and tips on Linux system configuration and administration, and software for Linux systems.
219 posts in total.
How to Add a File Based Swap for Linux
We 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 […]
Where Does Evolution Save Its Data and Configuration Files on Linux?
Evolution 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 […]
A Beginners’ Guide to x86-64 Instruction Encoding
The 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 […]
How To Debug Linux Kernel With Less Efforts
Introduction 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 […]
USB Standards and Supports in Linux
The 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:
How to Compile and Install Linux Kernel from the Source Code in an Existing Linux OS
Building 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 […]
How does linux kernel collect task stats data
Motivation ∞ 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 […]
Vim Tutorial for Beginners: vimtutor
There 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 […]
x-data-plane feature in QEMU/KVM
Abstract 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 […]
The length of timeslices for processes under CFS process scheduling algorithm in Linux Kernel
Abstract 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. […]
How sched_min_granularity_ns, sched_latency_ns and sched_wakeup_granularity_ns in CFS affect the timeslice of processes
Abstract 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 […]
How migration thread works inside of Linux Kernel
Abstract 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 […]
How sched_setaffinity works inside of Linux Kernel
Abstract Sometimes, we may want to migrate one process/thread to one specific CPU for some specific purpose. In the Unix/Linux systems, you may choose sched_setaffinity to finish this job. This article will help you to understand how sched_setaffinity (or other APIs like pthread_setaffinity_np in user-space) works internal Linux kernel. Details — sched_setaffinity(pid_t pid, const struct […]
How to Install Wine 32-bit on CentOS 7
Since version 7, RHEL has only x86-64 versions. The same thing happens to CentOS 7. In CentOS 7/EPEL, there is only package for Wine x86-64. However, many Windows .exe files are 32-bit. Even there are 64-bit versions for some software, their installation file is 32-bit. And for some certain software such as Office 2007, 32-bit […]
How to Change Systemd Boot Target on Linux
Many Linux distros, such as RHEL/CentOS 7, Fedora, Ubuntu 16, are now using systemd instead of init as the init system. It is common for Linux users to set Linux to boot to “GUI” or “Text” mode. The old way of changing ‘/etc/inittab’ for choosing Linux runlevels is not working for sytemd. This post will […]
How to Change Linux Account Password Through SSH: A Beginners’ Tutorial
People are sometimes given access to Linux/Unix and asked to change their initial passwords. But for beginners, changing a Linux/Unix password is not an easy task, especially when there is only SSH log on allowed to the Linux/Unix server. This post introduces how to change password of user USER on host HOST remotely using SSH. […]
How to Force Linux to Unmount a Filesystem Reporting “device is busy”
Linux may report “device is busy” when we try to umount a filesystem. This behavior is reasonable as it can help us avoid data loss by disallowing unmouting a filesystem when it is being used. But for situations when we are sure there is something wrong happened or we care not data lost such as […]
How to Disable and Enable Laptop Keyboard in Linux
Attaching a USB keyboard to a laptop is common when using a laptop because a normal keyboard may provide a more convenient typing experience. The laptop keyboard is not used in these situations. However, the laptop keyboard may still be touched by accident. In this post, we will discuss how to disable and enable the […]
How to Set the Static IP Address Using CLI in Fedora/CentOS Linux
How to set the static IP address for CentOS 7/Fedora 22+ is introduced in this post. Here, we assume the Linux is using NetworkManager to manage the network. All steps are done as root. Find the interface you want to set the address ∞ Command ifconfig -a lists all interfaces. Find the interface name to […]
