Jamie Kitman’s look at the twisted path Toyota followed to it’s current difficulties inspired me to think about software and money – two topics I spend way too much time thinking about. As a purely disinterested observer (ahem) it has
Linux semaphores
Re: Schedule idle MOLNAR Ingo (mingo@chiara.csoma.elte.hu) Wed, 11 Nov 1998 04:09:32 +0100 (CET) […] > _please_ We can do better than this. Only semaphores (not spinlocks) need > to have the priority inheritance. […] nope there are _not_ only semaphores,
Security for dummies – a lesson for smart grid
WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed
multicore and multiprocessor performance
Here’s two interesting tables Percentage of lock acquisitions for global TCP/IP locks that do not succeed immediately. OS Type 6 conns 192 conns 16384 conns MsgP 89 100 100 ConnP-L(4) 60 56 52 ConnP-L(8) 51 30 26 ConnP-L(16) 49 18
The ridiculous GPL-only tagging of Linux
Imagine that you release software under a license that is primarily concerned with making sure that modifiable source code is available to all and that no restrictions should ever be placed on derived works. Now imagine that someone takes a
10th anniversary of the RTLinux Manifesto paper
The RTLinux* Manifesto was published a little over 10 years ago at the 5th Linux Expo in Raleigh North Carolina which was really the first one with a bunch of suits wandering around. As a kind of celebration/experiment , I’m
More petty
The ALMA team has released ACS 8.0 on Red Hat 4.4, downgrading the Linux version from the foreseen 5.2 version. This choice, with the consequent back-porting of the code to the older OS version, had to be taken because of
Parallelism and multicore
The goal of modern processor chip design has changed from optimizing various speed/price/heat tradeoffs for applications to finding excuses for dumping more transistors into the device. Heard an interesting talk from Krisztián Flautner of ARM at the ACISC conference and
Deterministic multithreading
An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each
parallel processing and bash reduce
It’s sad that after all this time, one can look at any random article on parallel programming and find some variation of: for i = 1 … n create thread i do something end for as if that was the