Horms Solutions is Hiring

An Introduction to Open vSwitch

Yesterday afternoon I made a presentation introducing Open vSwitch at Linux Con Japan. This is an update on the presentation of the same title that I made at the Netfilter Workshop 2011.

SH-Mobile ARM zboot presentation

This afternoon I made a short presentation at Japan Technical Jamboree 37 the work that I have been doing to allow booting Linux directly on the SH-Mobile ARM platform. This is an update on the presentation on the same topic in January at MobileFOSS Miniconf, part of linux.conf.au Brisbane 2011.

A New Command

Mitigating Fork Disasters

I recently managed to make a bit of a mess of things while doing some multi-process programming using fork(). While the box was still semi-usable I was unable to kill off the processes faster than they were being created and I ended up resorting to a reboot.

At the time I wasn't entirely sure what the problem was and not cherishing the prospect of more reboots I used taskset to constrain my shell, its child processes including test runs of my program and of course its forked children to a single CPU.

# taskset -p 01 $$

The result? A subsequent fork explosion was indeed constrained to one CPU and I was able to kill off all the processes quite easily.

My system is a single socket with four cores. I have disabled hyper-threading so there is only one thread per core. I am unsure how well this technique would work in other situations, especially in the case of multiple threads but only one socket and one core.