Archive for 'Uncategorized'

UNIX IPC tutorial in C

Brian Hall, “Beej” wrote a cool tutorial explaining all the different aspects of traditional UNIX Inter Process Communication (IPC). He provides a lot of C code where you can compile / test these concepts yourself for a better understanding. The high level concepts in this tutorial would be great material to use in conducting technical [...]

My 1000th blog post

Wow, I can’t believe 999 blog entries have been posted to the prefetch blog! This blog started all the way back in October of 2004, and was a way for me to document technology as I learned it. I never thought people would actually read it, and am even more amazed that this site now [...]

Great write-up on AMD’s RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing) hardware assisted virtualization feature

I came across an awesome Q&Q where Tim Mueting from AMD described the hardware virtualization features in AMD Opteron CPUs. The following excerpt from the interview was especially interesting: “Prior to the introduction of RVI, software solutions used something called shadow paging to translate a virtual machine “guest” physical address to the system’s physical address. [...]

Securing Linux file systems that don’t contain executables

Linux comes with a slew of mount options, several of which are useful for locking down what can and can’t happen inside a file system. Three options I find super useful are noexec, nosuid and nodev. The noexec option disables execution for files that reside within a file system, nosuid disables execution of setuid executables [...]

Global search feature added to prefetch.net

I have posted a lot of material to my website over the past few years, and needed a way to easily locate content. To make finding material super easy, I recently added a global search page. I’m not sure if folks will find this useful, but I thought I would throw it out there in [...]

Compiling a custom kernel on Fedora and CentOS Linux hosts

I have been experimenting with lxc-containers, which use a number of features in the latest 2.6 kernels (specifically, namespaces). To ensure that I have the latest bug fixes and performance enhancements, I have been rolling my own kernels. This has been remarkably easy, since the Makefile that ships with the kernel has an option to [...]

« Older Entries