Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - )
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:39:21 -0500
On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:33:36 CST, reepex said:
Is this list up to date? It makes it seem as if you are learning basic linux commands, sed, and basic perl. Also why are you reading operating system design and implementation when you do not know C?
C is not a prerequisite for understanding operating systems design. It's only needed if the particular operating system you're working with implements its internals in C. What is more important is understanding the *concepts* - things like locking, and race conditions, and how fine-grained locking you need/want for a filesystem. Having one big lock is a lot easier, but causes contention - having a lot of little locks can cause deadlocks, especially in error handlers. What does the filesystem code do if (for example) it gets 2/3 of the way through the rename of a file, and encounters an I/O error while writing out the removal of the old name of the file? What are the trade-offs required for an operating system to support jitter-free multimedia applications (the first thing to learn is that throughput, latency, and jitter are intertwined, and it's very difficult to do all 3 well at the same time)? It's also important to understand that there are approaches other than Windows and Unix/Linux - IBM's VM and MVS systems have been around for a long time, and have a lot to tell us about other choices that can be made. There's still a lot of VMS running out there in scattered corners as well - and that system had a lot of concepts that one should understand, at least well enough to know why "my favorite system didn't do it that way because..." (Hint - consider how and why SYS$FOO variables worked in VMS, and why they're so hard to get working correctly under Linux - they're *not* exactly the same as Unix/Linux environment variables, and as such provide both problems and solutions that environment variables don't). Bonus points for knowing that VMS was mostly written in Bliss/32 or some such, and VM and MVS were a mixture of assembler and (later on) PL/S. No C knowledge needed for those critters... Even when the system *is* written in C, you don't need to be a C guru to understand what's going on. Maurice Bach's "The Design of the Unix Operating System" is probably one of the classic texts - but you don't need to know C any better than "read C code snippet as pseudocode" to follow it.
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Current thread:
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) Marcin Wielgoszewski (Jan 01)
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) Adam Muntner (Jan 01)
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) reepex (Jan 01)
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) Jeffrey Denton (Jan 01)
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) Marcin Wielgoszewski (Jan 01)
- Re: [Professional IT Security Providers - Exposed] QuietMove ( D - ) Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 02)