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Building Real-Time Systems with RTOS: Achieving Deterministic Low-Latency Performance
🔹 Understanding Real-Time Systems Real-time systems are not just about running fast — they are about running predictably. In a typical computer, slight timing variations are acceptable. But in real-time applications — like industrial automation, medical equipment, or autonomous vehicles — a delay of even a few microseconds can lead to catastrophic consequences.A real-time…
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Dynamic Memory Analysis with AddressSanitizer at the Binary Level
Memory bugs are silent killers in software systems. They don’t just crash applications — they open doors for data corruption, undefined behavior, and exploitable security holes. Static analysis can help, but it’s often blind to runtime behavior. That’s where AddressSanitizer (ASan) comes in — a brutal, low-level memory checker that catches your mistakes as…
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Optimizing Context Switches in the Linux Kernel: Hidden Performance Leverage
1. What Context Switching Really Costs Every time the kernel performs a context switch — moving execution from one thread to another — the CPU flushes registers, updates the program counter, and reloads process metadata. This is not “free multitasking.” It burns thousands of CPU cycles.When the switch rate spikes, cache locality is destroyed…
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Hypervisor-level Exploits: Why VM Isolation Isn’t a Silver Bullet
Virtualization is everywhere: cloud providers, enterprise datacenters, developer laptops, CI runners. It looks safe — each workload sits in its own virtual machine (VM), separated by the hypervisor. That visual separation lulls engineers into false confidence. Here’s the blunt truth: if the hypervisor breaks, your isolation is meaningless. Hypervisor-level exploits (VM escape, hypervisor compromise,…
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Kernel Locking and Concurrency Pitfalls in Operating Systems
In modern operating systems, concurrency isn’t optional — it’s fundamental. Multiple threads and processes access shared resources constantly: memory, I/O, scheduling queues, filesystem metadata. Without strict synchronization, the kernel becomes a war zone of race conditions, data corruption, and unpredictable crashes. The kernel sits at the lowest level of control. If a locking mistake…