Replaced by Paxos Demystified. Lamport’s “Paxos Made Simple” paper is notoriously hard to understand but at least part of the difficulty is that the algorithm changes radically in the middle of the presentation. The first part of the paper presents a
RTLinux
Some old stuff I found in the office
IEEE 1588 PTP is a mess
IEEE 1588 was not designed for modern enterprise computer networks and contains many hacks to make it sort of work. The standard also suffers from being overly explicit on some things and overly unspecific on others. One marker of the
The difference between unspecified, undefined, and non-deterministic
There is too much confusion in the “formal methods” computer science literature between these three different terms. Let me start with what this means for a state machine and then move on to engineering objects such as threads. Suppose we
Software quality at toyota
The good stuff starts on page 36 Koopman.
one way queues
Here’s some code for lock free queues for a single producer and single consumer. The code is designed for Intel multiprocessors with strong memory model. I don’t know what ARM offers these days. But the strong memory model for x86
The Auragen file system.
This article on the interesting Wave Transactional File System inspired me to look up an earlier file system that also used copy on write semantics. From: Anita Borg, Wolfgang Blau, Wolfgang Graetsch, Ferdinand Herrmann, and Wolfgang Oberle. 1989. Fault tolerance
Paxos and other consensus algorithms and the unaccountable love for asynchrony
I’ve been looking at Paxos and Raft and Zab and other algorithms that can loosely be called “consensus” algorithms because we want to see where we can improve distributed system operation with precision time synchronization or where we can offer novel features
More on Fischer, Lynch, Patterson and the parrot theorem.
I’m thinking about distributed consensus algorithms, timestamping, and databases and if you read that literature you will see many references to the Fischer, Lynch, Paterson “theorem”. Google Scholar tells me the paper has been cited more than 4500 times. The theorem
Patent 5,995,745
Adding real-time support to general purpose operating systems AbstractA general purpose computer operating system is run using a real time operating system. A real time operating system is provided for running real time tasks. A general purpose operating system is