systems

Systems Conferences

ByQ A

Which ones are good systems conferences? Top ones by ACM and USENIX: OSDI: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/179 SOSP: http://sosp.org/ Other SIGOPS Events: http://www.sigops.org/conf-sponsored.html EuroSys: http://www.eurosys.org/ SoCC: http://www.socc2013.org/ (SoCC 2013) ASPLOS: http://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/ASPLOS/Main VEE: http://www.sigplan.org/vee.htm USENIX ATC: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/131 NSDI: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/178 IEEE Conferences: ICDCS: http://www.temple.edu/cis/icdcs2013/ (2013) IPDPS: http://www.ipdps.org/ Other related ones and workshops: HPCA: Search HPCA ConferenceSC: http://www.supercomp.org/IEEE CLUSTER: http://www.clustercomp.org/ HotCloud:…

Consistency models for distributed systems

ByQ A

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…

SQL layers on NoSQL databases

ByQ A

What are the SQL layer solution over NoSQL databases such as key/value stores? Phoenix: A SQL layer on HBase: https://github.com/forcedotcom/phoenix They also show some performance results: https://github.com/forcedotcom/phoenix/wiki/Performance F1 – The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting Google’s Ad Business: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html With F1, we have built a novel hybrid system that combines the scalability, fault tolerance, transparent sharding,…

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Where Does Evolution Save Its Data and Configuration Files on Linux?

ByEric Ma

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…

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I/O Microscopy: Tasks’ Disk I/O Information with High Accuracy

ByWeiwei Jia

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….

How to Set up or Disable Call Forwarding in iOS for iPhone

ByDavid Yang

Call forwarding is useful if you are expected to be unavailable for receiving calls or lose cell phone coverage for some time. Call forwarding is not something that is “new” to modern phones. It is a feature which is invented in 1960s (the patent expired in 1980) of some telephone switching systems. But with iPhone/iOS,…

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x-data-plane feature in QEMU/KVM

ByWeiwei Jia

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…

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How migration thread works inside of Linux Kernel

ByWeiwei Jia

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…

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How sched_setaffinity works inside of Linux Kernel

ByWeiwei Jia

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 SYSCALL_DEFINE3(sched_setaffinity, pid_t, pid, unsigned int,…

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Notes for Beginners of Software Development on Linux

ByEric Ma

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…

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How to Regenerate Grub2 Config Files on Linux

ByEric Ma

Grub2 config file may need to be re-generated after changing Grub2 configurations such as configuration changes and setting default boot entries. The Grub2’s config file may be at different locations depending on your Linux distro and whether your Linux is booted in BIOS or UEFI mode. This makes regenerating Grub2 config file not easy for…

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How to Get Available Filesystem Space on Linux: a C Function with a C++ Example

ByEric Ma

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…

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Controlling Filesystem Mounting on Linux using /etc/fstab

ByEric Ma

Controlling the mounting of filesystems is a useful technique for managing Linux systems. The mounting configurations are mostly in the /etc/fstab file. In this post, we will discuss 2 common and useful techniques for controlling the filesystem mounting by playing with the /etc/fstab file: allowing non-root users to mount/unmount filesystems and avoiding mounting failures blocking…

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iPhone Connecting to Internet Using Windows PC’s Network through USB Cable

ByEric Ma

Note that this was only tested on certain combinations like this (Windows 7 with iOS 8), this (Windows 7 with iOS 7), this and this (Windows 7 with iOS 9.3.2 (iphone 6s)). Windows 7 seems a possible Windows OS that can work. Recently, I tested it on Windows 8 and iOS 9. Unfortunately, it did…