Just another trying-to-be-a-geek's blog
Posts tagged kernel
Securely Encrypt Removable Media with Ubuntu
Jan 13th
he other day my Dad mentioned that “any true geek always carries a USB drive with him”. I proved my geek-hood by producing the 2G titanium thumb drive from around my neck. I then did him one further by telling him that the drive was encrypted with AES 256 bit encryption. I don’t know whether or not he was impressed, but I sure proved that I am a true geek. It was this experience that prompted me to share my instructions on how to securely encrypt any removable drive.
Happy Birthday, Linus
Dec 28th
Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that’s essentially a private event for him, there’s an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too.
As is well known, before he started writing Linux, Linus coded on a Sinclair QL, a brilliant if rather bizarre system that was based on a cut-down version of the Motorola 68000 chip used in the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Linus was prepared to put up with the limitations of that chip because it offered multi-tasking – and hence the possibility of some advanced programming.
2.6.32 is Out! But a Word of Caution Around CFQ
Dec 7th
Everyone loves a shiny new kernel. The latest one, 2.6.32, was released on Dec. 3 and there are some nice updates/fixes for file systems and IO in general. But there is a very important change for the CFQ IO scheduler that you need to understand.
Ksplice Uptrack: Kernel updates without restart
Dec 7th
Me being a sysadmin should give you quite much an idea of how much do i hate to restart serves (and sometimes even my lappi) just to make some updates in effect and majority of the time its about kernel patches and updates. (more…)
vm.swappiness tweaks
Oct 3rd
First lets revise the basics.
In terms of performance, small storage devices are faster e.g. registers are faster than ram, RAM is faster than hard disk. And Swap is a dedicated partition to be used as paging alternate to RAM when there is not much RAM available.
Now how linux decides when to use swap or not? There is a sysctl parameter called vm.swappiness that is used by linux to decide. vm.swappiness is the kernel parameter that controls how kernel favors swap over RAM. By default its value is 60. So as you guess as value of 0 in the parameter would tell linux More >
