Anatomy of Linux synchronization methods

In your Linux® education, you may have learned about concurrency, critical sections, and locking, but how do you use these concepts within the kernel? This article reviews the locking mechanisms available within the 2.6 kernel, including atomic operators, spinlocks, reader/writer locks, and kernel semaphores. It also explores where each mechanism is most applicable for building safe and efficient kernel code.
This article explores many of the synchronization or locking mechanisms that are available in the Linux kernel. It presents the application program interfaces (APIs) for many of the available methods from the 2.6.23 kernel. But before you dig into the APIs, you need to understand the problem that's being solved.

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Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....

Noisy Neighbor Detection with eBPF.

T he Compute and Performance Engineering teams at Netflix regularly investigate performance issues in our multi-tenant environment. The first step is determining whether the problem originates from the application or the underlying infrastructure. One issue that often complicates this process is the "noisy neighbor" problem. On Titus, our multi-tenant compute platform, a "noisy neighbor" refers to a container or system service that heavily utilizes the server's resources, causing performance degradation in adjacent containers. We usually focus on CPU utilization because it is our workloads’ most frequent source of noisy neighbor issues, read more

Backing up MySQL data.

Backing up files and directories is relatively easy; databases, however, have some special quirks that you need to address. Our examples use MySQL, but the same principles apply to PostgreSQL and other relational databases. This article is excerpted from O'Reilly's recently published book Linux System Administration .

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