fidzu : kernel

A little while ago I been to a talk by Michael Verhulst of Terminal Labs. He made a career of descending into Devops disaster zones and righting things up, and shared some observations. One of his aphorisms was:

Nobody Is Google - Not Even Google

If I understood him right, he meant to say that scalability costs money and businesses flounder on buying more scalability than they need. Or, people think they are Google, but they are not. Even inside Google, only a small fraction of services operate at Google scale (aka planetary scale).

Apparently this sort of thing happens quite often.

14 Jan 2020 8:05pm GMT

The new year is in full swing and so are the preparations for the Linux Plumbers Conference in 2020! Updates coming soon! Until then you can watch some videos.

13 Jan 2020 8:39pm GMT

There is a new release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?.

This release features a number of formatting and build-system improvements by the indefatigible Akira Yokosawa. On the formatting side, we have listings automatically generated from source code, clever references, selective PDF hyperlink highlighting, and finally settling the old after-period one-space/two-space debate by mandating newline instead. On the build side, we improved checks for incompatible packages, SyncTeX database file generation (instigated by Balbir Singh), better identification of PDFs, build notes for recent Fedora releases, fixes for some multiple-figure page issues, and improved font handling, and a2ping workarounds for ever-troublesome Ghostscript. In addition, the .bib file format was dragged kicking and screaming out of the 1980s, prompted by Stamatis Karnouskos. The new format is said to be more compatible with modern .bib-file tooling.

On the content side, the "Hardware and its Habits", "Tools of the Trade", "Locking", "Deferred Processing", "Data Structures", and "Formal Verification" chapters received some much needed attention, the latter by Akira, who also updated the "Shared-Variable Shenanigans" section based on a recent LWN article. SeongJae Park, Stamatis, and Zhang Kai fixed a large quantity of typos and addressed numerous other issues. There is now a full complement of top-level section epigraphs, and there are a few scalability results up to 420 CPUs, courtesy of a system provided by my new employer.

On the code side, there have been a number of bug fixes and updates from ACCESS_ONCE() to READ_ONCE() or WRITE_ONCE(), with significant contributions from Akira, Junchang Wang, and Slavomir Kaslev.

A full list of the changes since the previous release may be found here, and as always, git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulmck/perfbook.git will be updated in real time.

08 Jan 2020 5:02am GMT