Blog
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Another installment of my weekly reviews. I think the practice of carving out around 30 minutes on Sunday to look back at the previous week and look forward for the next week helps me in several ways. First, the posts help me recognize my tiny little victories that I often neglect and they also help…
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Part 1 of barrier synchronization covers my notes on the first couple types of synchronization barriers including the naive centralized barrier and the slightly more advanced tree barrier. This post is a continuation and covers the three other barriers: MCS barrier, tournament barrier , dissemination barrier. Summary In the MCS tree barrier, there are two…
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My wife’s apple iPhone X saves images she captured with her camera as .heic format1 , a relatively new file format that compresses high quality images and I needed a way to convert these type of files to .jpeg (which apparently dates back to 1992) so that they can be uploaded to my blog and…
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Hooray! Today is the first day in a couple weeks that air quality is considered good, at least according to the EPA. I’m so pleased and so grateful for clean air because my wife and daughter have not left the house since the wild fires started a week ago (or was it two weeks —…
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As mentioned previously, there are different types of synchronization primitives that us operating system designers offer. If as an application designer you nee to ensure only one thread can access a piece of shared memory at a time, use a mutual exclusion synchronization primitive. But what about a different scenario in which you need all…
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With working remote and establishing a (somewhat) daily routine (that has become pretty monotonous), it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. But that reality is amplified because of the recent wild fires, forcing those of us living in the pacific north west (PNW) — and those living in…
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What’s the deal with a sense reversing barrier? Even after watching the lectures on the topic, I was still confused as to how a single flag could toggle between two values (true and false) can communicate whether or not all processes (or threads) are running in the same critical section. This concept completely baffled me.…
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I had mentioned yesterday that I slept horribly, waking up early and starting day off at around 03:45 AM. That wake up time was brutal and as a result, I crashed and burned in the afternoon, leveraging those precious 30 minutes of my lunch to nap in my wife’s / daughter’s bedroom (a room with…
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In part 1 of synchronization, I talked about the more naive spin locks and other naive approaches that offer only marginally better performance by adding delays or reading cached caches (i.e. avoiding bus traffic) and so on. Of all the locks discussed thus far, the array based queuing lock offers low latency, low contention and…
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Today is going to be rough. I slept horribly, waking up multiple times throughout the night. Ultimately, I rolled out of my tri-folding foam mattress (a temporary bed while my daughter and wife sleep on the mattress in a separate room as to not wake me up: that parent life) at 03:45 AM this morning.…
