These resources (articles, books, and videos) are useful when you're starting to learn the language, or when you're learning a specific part of the language. This an opinionated list, no doubt. I've compiled this list from writing and teaching Clojure over the last 10 years.
| Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012) | |
| ---------------------------------- | |
| L1 cache reference 0.5 ns | |
| Branch mispredict 5 ns | |
| L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache | |
| Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns | |
| Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache | |
| Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us | |
| Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us | |
| Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD |
In order of first appearance in The Morning Paper.
The Linux kernel is written in C, so you should have at least a basic understanding of C before diving into kernel work. You don't need expert level C knowledge, since you can always pick some things up underway, but it certainly helps to know the language and to have written some userspace C programs already.
It will also help to be a Linux user. If you have never used Linux before, it's probably a good idea to download a distro and get comfortable with it before you start doing kernel work.
Lastly, knowing git is not actually required, but can really help you (since you can dig through changelogs and search for information you'll need). At a minimum you should probably be able to clone the git repository to a local directory.
| *C function* | |
| int fact(int n){ | |
| if (n <= 1) return 1; | |
| return n * fact(n-1); | |
| } | |
| -- | |
| *NASM code* | |
| default rel | |
| global _main | |
| section .data |
| //This uses char* pointers. The same thing can be done using character arrays as well. | |
| #include<stdio.h> | |
| #include<stdlib.h> | |
| void mystrcpy(char* first, char* second){ | |
| while(*first != '\0'){ | |
| *second = *first; | |
| first++; | |
| second++; | |
| } |
My notes from attempting to read the Dynamo paper ( Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store)
Buzzwords: Key-Value store, primary key, eventual consistency, CAP theorem, hinted handoff, consistent hashing, virtual nodes.
This document was originally written several years ago. At the time I was working as an execution core verification engineer at Arm. The following points are coloured heavily by working in and around the execution cores of various processors. Apply a pinch of salt; points contain varying degrees of opinion.
It is still my opinion that RISC-V could be much better designed; though I will also say that if I was building a 32 or 64-bit CPU today I'd likely implement the architecture to benefit from the existing tooling.
Mostly based upon the RISC-V ISA spec v2.0. Some updates have been made for v2.2
The RISC-V ISA has pursued minimalism to a fault. There is a large emphasis on minimizing instruction count, normalizing encoding, etc. This pursuit of minimalism has resulted in false orthogonalities (such as reusing the same instruction for branches, calls and returns) and a requirement for superfluous instructions which impacts code density both in terms of size and
