Multiprocessor systems are mainstream these days. From the desktop to the datacenter, systems with more than one processor are used for everything from high-end desktop applications to large datacenter backends. This month, Jim takes a brief look at the multiprocessor systems architectures in use today, including the shared memory multiprocessor architecture, Sun's choice for its multiprocessor systems. His discussion will provide a solid background for a segue into the locking primitives used by the Solaris kernel to facilitate multiprocessor platform support.
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 ....
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