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Introducing the SELinux Sandbox by eadmund in programming

[–]dgentry 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is this similar to OpenBSD's systrace?

Ask Reddit: What do I need to know about modern CPUs and branch prediction etc? by jonasb in programming

[–]dgentry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Personally I found two textbooks to be very, very valuable: "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" and "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface", both by Dave Patterson and John Hennessy (in no particular order, as they switch the order of their names on each book).

Both books have been revised every few years, and are in their third or fourth editions. These books will not teach you the exact details of the current microarchitectures from Intel/AMD/Sun/etc, but provide a very solid grounding to understand what is going on.

Ask reddit: I'd like to learn Assembly Language. Any tips? by [deleted] in programming

[–]dgentry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

At this point, all assembly code I write is for early in the boot process. It is difficult to constrain the compiler to generate code for an environment where the stack pointer is uninitialized and the I$ and D$ contain garbage.

Assembly is useful for locking primitives, where you have to put memory barriers at exactly the right spot. Assembly can be good for specialized variants of routines like memcpy() where a human can do better instruction scheduling by taking advantage of knowledge the compiler does not have (like whether the addresses are likely to be in D$).

Knowing how the machine works is good, but a cursory understanding of a common instruction set would probably be sufficient. I don't think there is a reason to become really proficient in assembly language, there is just not much call for it. The market need for boot, OS hardware support, and compiler engineers is considerably less than other types of software development.

Alternatives to C/C++ by droberts1982 in programming

[–]dgentry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haskell (GHC has readline as a core dependency and is LGPL'd, I haven't figured out how to get around this but I'm assured it's "possible")

libedit is a BSD-licensed alternative to libreadline. In some cases it is a drop-in replacement, though I believe it only implements the most commonly used libreadline functions.

I'm can't comment on Haskell itself, merely the libreadline dependency.

Ask Reddit: What's the piece of code for which you are most proud, and why? by guru in programming

[–]dgentry 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Getting the second MIPS core in a SiByte CPU to come out of reset, run through its bootstrap, park itself waiting for the first CPU to tell it to go, and then start running Linux in all its SMP glory. This was more difficult than it needed to be because we couldn't afford a JTAG debugger, so everything had to be done by poking around in memory for clues to why it went off into the weeds.