My Favorite LWN Articles

Saturday. October 27, 2018 - 1 min

Why

LWN.net has a lot of really well-written articles, and I’ve been collating some great articles for people at different skill levels. The initial inspiration for this was to find articles for an operating systems class I was tutoring.

Introductory Articles

• Ulrich Drepper’s 7-part series on what every programmer should know about memory

Intermediate-Level

• Variable-length arrays, pros and cons
• What if we we used really large pages (> 1 MB) versus the smaller page sizes that we normally use?
• How can we get more fine-grained security than just having read/write/execute permissions for files? Could we restrict particular applications to only access certain directories?. See also: the pledge() syscall.
• System calls are slow since we need to switch to the OS: can we allow certain syscalls to be implemented in user-space memory? (vDSO)
• How does a program get run?