General Development Archive

In last month's column, Dr. Edward G. Bradford, senior programmer at IBM, covered synchronization primitives and gave a reprise on pipes. This month he takes a first look at communication using sockets. Ed demonstrates some techniques for writing a sockets program and shows how his programming techniques perform in various operating system environments.

"Reiserfs is fast and reliable. The new ext3 is an easy upgrade. Both journal metadata, but ext3 journals data too, but at a big price. Which journaling filesystem is right for you?" The IDG Network discusses which Linux journaling filesystem is right for you. Our Take: Personally, I would definetely go with SGI's XFS.

KDE Studio Gold is a full-fledged IDE for the development of sophisticated C++ applications - including the high utility features you expect from a modern development environment, such as code completion, dynamic syntax highlighting and popup function parameter lookup. Debugging is simplified by tight integration with kdbg in the IDE, and comprehensive documentation is provided. Version 3.0 is now available and shipping. TheKompany added a couple of new features to this final release, which includes an integrated Programmers Calculator and Font Viewer. Demo versions are also available.

Will Dyson wrote in to inform us about the brand new version of his BFS filesystem driver for the Linux 2.4.x kernel. His code is based on Makoto Kato's original work, while there is another, older, version of a BFS driver for kernels 2.2.x already available. These drivers are all read-only and they do not (yet) expose the BeFS's advanced features like attributes and indexes.

"Nothing determines the peculiar behavior, the feel - even the ultimate success or failure of an operating system - like its virtual memory design." A must-read article for all the Linux coders regarding the problems of the Linux VM so far and the solutions presented recently. Another good reading regarding VMs is an article about the FreeBSD VM, which is known to be one of the best VMs available.

Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.

Following up the interview which OSNews hosted recently regarding modern journaled filesystems, here are two tutorials on how to convert your / (root) Linux partition to SGI's XFS or IBM's JFS filesystems.

He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it's not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent's Bell Labs we're talking about ­ the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It's a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it's nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine's Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman." More at Linux Magazine.