sprocket i/o

Clover, Maisy, and Dallas's Thinkpad.

I haven’t posted a whole heck of a lot recently, so I thought I would check in. Things are pretty quiet in the house right now. Dallas is off to Phoenix, AZ for some training, I’m busy at home being a workaholic, and Clover is just sitting around for the most part. I’ve been spending my freetime babysitting dogs, helping Dallas go furniture shopping, shopping for Christmas presents, daydreaming about buying a motorcycle, playing with Ubuntu Linux, rebuilding Dallas’s laptop, craving Kilroy’s, playing DDR, and reading some very nice books which I’ll review in a moment.

Tonight I’m going to Bill’s Birthay bash at Bucca Di Beppo, and next week I’m flying out to see my family for Christmas vacation. As per usual, I’ve been pretty slack as far as buying all the gifts in time. Every year I seem to forget about the pre-Christmas work crunch that happens at every employer I’ve ever worked at. It seems that people always want to try to cram 4 weeks of work into the first two weeks of December, just to make sure that everyone’s vacation is well-earned. Now, on to the books:

Performance Tuning for Linux Servers

One of my frequent complaints about running big Linux servers is the immaturity or lack of performance analysis tools or easy tuning compared to other platforms such as Solaris. To an extent, this book proved me wrong. While Linux does not yet have dtrace, and I still haven’t found a tool analogous to psio, there are still some wonderful tools out there like OProfile. I think the biggest things I got from this book were a decent treatment of the Linux VM system, filesystem tuning, I/O schedulers, and sar flags I didn’t know about. My first major gripe is that no UNIX book should ever show the output of a command without the command-line used shown at the top. I spent much time reading man pages and scratching my head at what flags they used to get their output. The other gripe is that many times new acronyms or terms are brought up suddenly, without any explanation of what they mean. This book is best read with a copy of Google nearby.

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

I had always avoided picking up the previous iteration of the book for 4.4BSD, due to it’s age, but the more I think about it, the more things have stayed the same. This book is an excellent companion piece to Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture. It shows the BSD way of doing things, which is applicable to most UNIX’s anyways. This book takes you through it all: scheduling, context switches, vm, devices, NFS, IPC, TCP, and filesystems. I think the sections I was happiest about in this book were about softupdates and FreeBSD jails, due to their implementations being FreeBSD specific. This book made me miss FreeBSD in a sentimental way. I used to swear by FreeBSD for nearly everything from 1997 through 2001. Then Linux , Solaris, and Mac OS X really took precedence for me. I really wish I could find an analogous book for the Linux platform. Any recommendations?

Solaris Systems Programming

I don’t know why this book made me as happy as it did. The book is quite similar to the classic Advanced UNIX Programming (I didn’t know they made a second edition!), but specifically Solaris. The book is essentially a walkthrough of the system API for all the basic UNIX services such as security, time, I/O, resources, files, directories, IPC’s and pipes. Rather than just giving you a toolbox, the author takes the time to explain why some tools are better than others, and how to use them safely (and securely). Rich Teer, like Stevens, writes with a no-nonsense style, with a feeling of both understanding and passion behind it. I had so many Eureka! moments reading this book that it was well worth the $60 I paid for it. I will never be a full-time C programmer, but this book gives a lot of background for understanding what’s under the engine.

I also happened to notice that a 2nd edition of Solaris Internals was coming out this Spring. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for a thoughtful 2nd edition of TCP/IP Illustrated.