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Consistency models for distributed systems

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

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,…

Free server images – SysTutorials QA

Any free server images? 24 Free Data Center Photos from fatcow.com 24 Free Data Center Photos: http://www.fatcow.com/data-center-photos From Wikimedia commons: Multiple servers: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server-multiple.svg Server: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server.svg Yellow server: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server-yellow.svg Green server: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server-green.svg More from clker.com: Web Virtualization Server clip art: http://www.clker.com/clipart-1826.html Small Case Web Mail Server clip art: http://www.clker.com/clipart-1902.html Inside our data centers from Google —…

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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…

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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…

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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: <= 60MB/s, or 480 Mbps…

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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…

Additional Repositories for CentOS Linux

CentOS is a super solid Linux distro. However, its default repository’s packages are limited compared to Fedora. Even Fedora needs some additional repositories to have software packages for daily usage, such as MPlayer, ffmpeg. Fortunately, some community maintained repositories provides these software. In this post, we introduce theses additional common repositories and how to install…

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Controlling Filesystem Mounting on Linux using /etc/fstab

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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Keyboard Key Mapping for Emacs: Evil Mode and Rearranging Alt, Ctrl and Win Keys

Ctrl keys are important and possibly most frequently used in Emacs. However, it is painful on today’s common PC keyboards since Ctrl keys are usually in the corner of the keyboard main area. Why the key mappings in Emacs are designed like this? After it was designed, Emacs was commonly on the Lisp Machine keyboards…

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Improving ssh/scp Performance by Choosing Suitable Ciphers

Update on Oct. 9, 2014: You should be aware of the possible security problems of blowfish and it is suggested not to be used. Instead, you may consider ChaCha20 as suggested by Tony Arcieri. To use this with OpenSSH, you need to specify the Ciphers in your .ssh/config files as chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com possibly with another default…