Nondeterministic code is hard to debug since bugs are not consistently reproducible. It’s easy to notice that the code is perhaps nondeterministic if multi-threading or random functions are involved. However we can still write nondeterministic single-threaded code without using random functions.
JIT in Action
Good Economics for Hard Times
Software Engineering Laws
Floating-Point Surprises
The single-precision floating-point or double-precision floating-point has finite precision so loss of significance can happen and cause surprises.
Interaction Between HugeTLBFS and Hugepages
This post shows the interaction between hugetlbfs and huge pages by an example program. All the results are based on linux 3.10.0-514.55.4.el7.x86_64.
Linux PID
In the Linux world, pid means two things. It’s the id of a process from POSIX’s point of view and the id of a task from kernel’s point of view.
Microbenchmark
Microbenchmark is used to measure the performance of a small piece of code for the purpose of performance optimization. Writing a good microbenchmark is hard and that’s why we should use microbenchmark frameworks (e.g. JMH for Java and Google Benchmark for C++) to help us. This post contains microbenchmarks that I think are interesting.
One-Liners
HugeTLBFS Read Bug
Hit a Linux kernel bug that read()
returns wrong data if it crosses a hugepage boundary.