Which are the consistency models used for distributed systems? Papers that survey the consistency models Robert C. Steinke and Gary J. Nutt. 2004. A unified theory of shared memory consistency. J. ACM 51, 5 (September 2004), 800-849. DOI=10.1145/1017460.1017464 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1017460.1017464 David Mosberger. 1993. Memory consistency models. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 27, 1 (January 1993), 18-26. DOI=10.1145/160551.160553…
I want to learn transactional memory technologies. Any suggestions on Transactional memory learning materials? Thanks! I highly suggest the Transactional Memory lecture by James R. Larus and Ravi Rajwar of Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture: The Transactional Memory lecture:http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00070ED1V01Y200611CAC002 Link to the PDF:http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00070ED1V01Y200611CAC002
How to disable all swaps on Linux to force the application/kernel use the physical memory? To diable all swaps on Linux, run this command as root: # swapoff -a -a means all swaps. Similarly, to enable all swaps on Linux: # swapon -a
What is the x86-64 calling convention by gcc? The calling convention of the System V AMD64 ABI is followed on GNU/Linux. The registers RDI, RSI, RDX, RCX, R8, and R9 are used for integer and memory address arguments and XMM0, XMM1, XMM2, XMM3, XMM4, XMM5, XMM6 and XMM7 are used for floating point arguments. For…
How to get a file’s size in C? If you have the file stream (FILE * f): fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END); // seek to end of file size = ftell(f); // get current file pointer fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET); // seek back to beginning of file // proceed with allocating memory and reading the file Or, #include…
In Linux, mmap() is a system call that is used to map a portion of a file or device into the memory of a process. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as memory-mapped I/O, shared memory, and virtual memory management. However, when mapping a large range of memory that is larger…
We ever discussed fixing ports used by NFSv3 so that it can be easily exported to external networks. For NFSv4.1 or higher, things are much easier. The ports for mountd, statd, and lockd are not required in a pure NFSv4 environment. We have less ports to control or allow for connections. Only port 111 and…
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…
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…
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….
Linux is a great platform for software development targeting servers or backends. In general, working on Linux is very productive. The problem that beginners on Linux face is the the learning curve is steep at the beginning. But believe me, after you get through the initial green steep learning step as in the figure below…
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,…
Having to go the the server room to reset servers is the most headache thing for admins managing a cluster of Linux servers in a remote site. Either you can ping the server but can not ssh to it, or you even can not ping it. There are various reasons that may cause a Linux…
The Linux kernel has a generic driver for a graphic framebuffer named vesafb on intel boxes. It provides a nice large console for most of modern displays. Setting VESA modes for Linux kernel with 32-bit and 16-bit boot protocol are different. We introduce both methods here. Linux kernel with 32-bit boot protocol For machine with…
Hadoop 2 or YARN is the new version of Hadoop. It adds the yarn resource manager in addition to the HDFS and MapReduce components. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications, which is an open-source variant of MapReduce designed and implemented by Google initially for processing and generating large data…
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…
I ever introduced [[installing-xen-domain-0-on-fedora-17]] as the first try to use the xen package delivered from Fedora and get away from manually compiling Xen and patching the kernel. In this post, I introduce installing Xen Dom0 on Fedora 20. Installing Xen First, install the xen pacakges: # yum install xen The Linux kernel is already ready…
Programs may want to catch the kill signals sent by the kill command in C programs on Linux so that it can gracefully shutdown itself before it is killed. For example, I have a daemon progd running, and it may be killed by pkill progd. The progd may want to save some in-memory state to…
WordPress can be very fast after some effort on performance optimization with the help from its plenty of plugins. Possible ways include using cache to cut down the number of database queries, improves HTML/JavaScript/CSS code, and optimizing PHP’s performance with opcode cache. In this post, we introduce how to speed up WordPress with OPcache, page…
Error handling and resource management are pervasive in programs. RAII originated in C++ is great. With RAII, it is much easier to write easy-to-read code that allocats/deallocats resources in the constructor/destructors. By representing a resource with a local object, we are sure that local object’s destructor will release the resource and will not forget to…