This is the release notes for linux release v0.95 (source code: linux-0.95.tar.gz) with format adjusted by removing/replacing tabs/spaces/new lines. This notes document can give us an understanding of the early development of the Linux kernel. The original ASCII formatted version is at the end of this post. RELEASE NOTES FOR LINUX v0.95 Linus Torvalds, March…
RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a widely used public-key cryptosystem that is used for secure communication over the internet. In this post, we will explore how to generate a pair of RSA private and public keys in Linux using the OpenSSL library. Generating a pair of RSA private and public keys in Linux using OpenSSL is a…
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…
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…
When we create VMs in KVM, we may don’t know the IP addresses because they are automatically assigned by DHCP. So we want to get them in VMM so that can login by SSH. Do the commands as follows. $ virsh domiflist hvm1 Interface Type Source Model MAC ——————————————————- vnet0 network default virtio 52:54:00:1c:36:cd $…
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./4Ktest100M bs=4KB count=25000*9 dd: invalid number `25000*9′ I think ‘dd’ should support calculation for its parameters like ‘bs’, ‘count’ and so on. You can get the effect by using some other tools/commands, like dd if=/dev/zero of=./4Ktest100M bs=4KB count=$((25000*9)) or dd if=/dev/zero of=./4Ktest100M bs=4KB count=$(bc <<< 25000*9) I think it makes sense. Thank…
What is the common SSD read/write throughput on common SSDs? Following is a very brief test of the speed of a SSD that I have by hand: # time dd conv=fsync if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=8192 count=1048576 1048576+0 records in 1048576+0 records out 8589934592 bytes (8.6 GB) copied, 20.6098 s, 417 MB/s real 0m21.377s user 0m0.089s sys…
dd seems slow when I use command like # dd if=/dev/sda2 of=./sda2.bak How to make it faster? You can make dd faster by specifying a good bs like # dd if=/dev/sda2 of=./sda2.bak bs=8192 8192 is a magic number. There are may be other good sizes for bs for different systems. But 8192 works pretty well…
dd is a handy tool on Linux. But is it possible to run it on Windows? I find the dd in cygwin works very well for me. It provides as almost (if not the same) functions as the dd on Linux. The disks are specified in /dev/ as on Linux. This solution means: you need…
VM disks in public cloud may be shared by customers. This is privacy problem. Is there a quick method to sniff the data left on a Linux VM? One possible method: # dd if=/dev/xvda bs=1M | strings -n 100 > strings.txt Using the dd and strings which are pervasive on Linux systems.
How to efficiently archive a very large sparse file, say 1TB? The sparse file may contains a small amount of data, say 32MB. SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA The SEEK_HOLE/SEEK_DATA functionalities play the trick and makes `tar` and `cp` handle the large sparse file very efficiently. `lseek` with `SEEK_HOLE` returns the offset of the start of the…
Abstract Most popular task monitor systems (such as top, iotop, proc, etc) can only get tasks’ disk I/O information like tasks’ I/O utilization percentage every seconds due to kernel timer/tick frequency and high time cost of system interfaces. This article presents I/O Microscopy, a new way to get tasks’ disk I/O information with high accuracy….
This post introduces how to install a paravirtualized CentOS 7 DomU on Xen. The very common way of installing DomU does not work for CentOS 7. A little trick to set the repository and the network used by the VM should be used by adding a setting strings to the “extra=” field for this VM….
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…
It is common practice to calculate the checksums for files to check its integrity. For large files, the checksum computation is slow. Now I am wondering why it is so slow and whether choosing another tool will be better. In this post, I try three common tools md5sum, sha1sum and crc32 to compute checksums on…
RAID systems such as MegaRAID add signatures to disks to maintain the infomration on these didks. When we simply remove these disks and install them to another server, Linux on the new server may detect these RAID signature infomration and refuses to continue write to the disk. Here is one example that mkfs reports “apparently…
It is common for programs to write to files in filesystems on disks. However, what if the disk was almost full when your program writes to the filesystem on a disk? For systems software and mission critical programs, it is a better or must-to-do practice to check the available filesystem space before actually writing to…
SSD is common for VPS and PaaS virtual machines for higher I/O performance. Now, it is coming to shared hosting too. DreamHost states that “Now with solid state drives (SSDs), our standard web hosting loads pages 200% faster”. We ourselves are happy to know this performance improvement with the price kept the same. Good work,…
In this post, creating a file-backed virtual block device (VBD) and installing Fedora 20 in the Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. This domain is created on a Fedora 20 Dom0 as introduced in https://www.systutorials.com/installing-xen-on-fedora-20-as-domain-0/. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD The actual space of VBD will…
LVM’s snapshot feature enables us to duplicate an LVM backed Xen DomU in seconds inside of the same volume group. When we want to duplicate LVM backed Xen DomU from a remote server, we need to make use of LVM’s snapshot function and tools like scp and dd. Backing up the DomU is only part…