Grml is a Linux Live CD distribution geared towards system administration tasks and other console work. Unfortunately, its development has slowed down in the past years, i.e. the latest stable release is from 2014. In 2017, when dealing with modern hardware, modern features like Btrfs, SELinux etc. this is …
The firmware updates for the Samsung 840 EVO SSDs come as ISO images which isn't very helpful if your system doesn't have a CDROM drive. It turns out that the ISO images just contain DOS binaries, though. This article describes how to use a FreeDOS USB stick for flashing, instead …
Traditionally, UNIX filesystems also maintain the access time (atime) of a file. This is very much an anti-feature because it yields a write operation for each read operation. Which is obviously bad for performance. Since Btrfs is a copy-on-write (COW) filesystem maintaining atimes is even more painful. Thus, a sensible …
Dell distributes BIOS updates for the Latitude E7270 as PE32 Windows GUI executables. It turns out that the BIOS itself is able to extract the firmware images from such executables and to apply them.
https://www.dell.com/support/home …When sending a POST request with curl it sometimes automatically
adds an Expect: 100-continue header. The following summarizes under
which conditions curl/libcurl adds this header.
The Expect: 100-continue header is specified in HTTP 1.1 and
allows the server to acknowledge or reject a POST/PUT request
immediately …
The Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) probably isn't the most popular protocol but it can be useful for troubleshooting purposes and for mapping the neighbourhood of a host.
Its purpose is basically to send/receive key/value pairs that are of general interest. For example the switch port number the …
This article discusses hardware performance counter measurements obtained for a character search benchmark running on Intel x86 and SPARC hardware. Those results help to explain the big runtime differences between a SPARC T5 system and Intel x86 ones (SPARC being much slower), as well as differences between the different implementations …
The article std::find() and memchr() Optimizations contains benchmark results for an Intel Core i5, an i7 and an older AMD system. This followup also adds results for a relatively recent SPARC system and an older PPC one.
First released in 2013, the SPARC T5 is a relative …
Assume you need to parse a record based format with flexible
width and one-byte delimiters. When using C++, the std::find() STL
algorithm is the obvious choice for efficiently locating the
delimiters. The idiomatic C solution is to use memchr().
The purpose of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is to instruct the
linker to consider additional directories when searching for libraries. Its
valid use case is the test of alternative library versions installed in
non-standard locations. In contrast to that, globally setting the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH (e.g. in the profile of a …