This post summarizes new features, bugfixes and changes in Linux kernel release 4.19.70. Linux 4.19.70 Release contains 95 changes, patches or new features. In total, there are 101,521 lines of Linux source code changed/added in Linux 4.19.70 release compared to Linux 4.19 release. To view the source code of Linux 4.19.70 kernel release online, please…
Linux is the most used and well-known open-source operating system for computers, mobile devices, servers, and mainframes, etc. Linux has so many awesome features to serve its users like Live CD/USB. And it is fast, easy and free to use by computers around the world. The kernel is referred to as the essential component of…
How to get a path’s mtime in C++ on Linux? The path can be a file or a dir. You may call the standard library function lstat() for the file or dir under the path. int lstat(const char *pathname, struct stat *statbuf); From the returned stat struct, there is a field st_mtim which is the…
What is the difference between work conserving I/O scheduler and non-work conserving I/O scheduler? In a work-conserving mode, the scheduler must choose one of the pending requests, if any, to dispatch, even if the pending requests are far away from the current disk head position. The rationale for non-work-conserving schedulers, such as the anticipatory scheduler…
Two notices: 1, a process has only one main thread which is itself. 2, a process has many threads. Solution 1: Please use taskstats [1] related interfaces, and send TASKSTATS_TYPE_PID and TASKSTATS_TYPE_TGID commands to kernel to get a process’s ‘blkio_delay_total’ parameter for a process with one main thread and a process with threads separately. Solution…
In C++, how to print a string as a line to STDOUT? That is, the string and the newline character, nicely? And similarly, how to print the line to STDERR? In C++, you may print the string and then ‘n’ or std::endl to STDOUT by operating on the std::cout stream: std::cout << your_string << std::endl;…
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…
I frequently hear that cin is significantly slower than scanf in C++. Is this true? And how to improve the efficiency of cin? It is really nice to use most of time. One discussion about that cin is very slow is here: http://apps.topcoder.com/forums/?module=Thread&threadID=508058&start=0&mc=7 In short: cin is not always slower (can be faster actually, see…
Introduction As we know, network subsystems are important in computer systems since they are I/O systems and need to be optimized with many algorithms and skills. This article will introduce how QEMU/KVM [2] network part works. In order to put everything simple and easy to understand, we will begin with several examples and then understand…
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….
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 Linux…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
A pop-up terminal is great and handy on Linux and similar OS. On KDE, Yakuake is great. On Gnome or GTK, I ever tried Guake. It is quite good. However, it has not been as mature, stable and figure-rich as gnome-terminal. One day, I got this idea: why not using a script/program to manage the…
The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory…
This posts list benchmark (using bonnie++) result of I/O performance of Xen LVM and loopback backed VBDs. The configuration of machines Dom0 VCPU: 2 (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz) Memory: 2GB Xen and Linux kernel: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified 2.6.32.13 kernel DomU VCPU: 2 Memory: 2GB Linux kernel: Fedora (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64) DomU’s profile: name=”10.0.1.200″ vcps=2…
Here is a list of problem that may occur during installing and configuring Xen Dom0 in Fedora. It is found originally in Fedora systems, but the tips in this post should also be helpful for installing Xen Dom0 on other platforms. BIOS configuration If xen stops at: “I/O virtualization disabled.” We may need to enable…
Creating file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for Xen virtual machines and installing Fedora 12 in Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. Note that this tutorial is based on a pretty old OS (Fedora 12). But the method here is still valid while some minor details may need to be changed for latest Xen and…