If you’ve worked with real-time Linux systems — especially DPDK deployments where you’ve got isolated CPUs running single busy-loop RT tasks — you know this problem well: kernel threads starve. A high-priority RT task sits on a CPU, doing its thing, and meanwhile essential system threads never get scheduled. Eventually things start breaking. Sometimes you get degradation, sometimes you get hangs.

Disclaimer: this is a mental note in the form of a blog post for future references. Most of it is a summary of a debug session to solve this issue.

It is incredible how we can find room for improvement even in the eldest and battle-tested codebases out there. This post is about one of these cases.

The other day I was working on a bug where kernel-rt-debug reported some warnings in the middle of the rcutorture test followed by a kernel hang:

As the last project of 2020, I and some other co-workers were assigned the task of creating a prototype for a graphical user interface preview Visual Studio extension for the NUI graphics toolkit. Notice the extension is for Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code.

C++ enums historically gave me some headaches due to the fact that compilers are free to choose the size of the type for whatever criteria they think. This makes particularly hard to write portable code among compilers from ABI point of view (Visual C++ vs C++ Builder, anyone?).

Since I left Mozilla I came back to my old days as a C/C++ developer. One of the projects I am working on is porting the Tizen.NUI API to Windows. Tizen.NUI itself is written in C#, so it doesn’t require any major effort to run on Windows, but it is heavily based on DALi, and there where the job lies. DALi kind of works on Windows already, but I caught several bugs affecting 64 bits. You can refer to the pull requests to get details on what was wrong.

For the past months, I have been working on adding Taskcluster support for packet.net cloud provider. The reason for that is to get faster Firefox for Android CI tests. Tests showed that jobs run up to 4x faster on bare metal machines than EC2.

For the last year I have been using the Go programming language, working on the implementation of the taskcluster-worker project. If you want to learn more about taskcluster-worker, you can read this post.

Some days ago, a friend emailed me desperated because a Java code was faster than his C++ implementation. These Java faster than C++ claims were very common when Java was the tech companies fashion language. I never liked Java because I always thought it was quite verbose (however, I never tried the new functional constructions in Java 8) and used to be very heavy. I mean, I could recognize that an app was written in Java in a blink of eyes, just by looking how slow it was. Things have changed since, but as I was never a professional Java programmer, I didn’t follow the language evolution.

In this quarter, I worked on implementing the taskcluster-worker Mac OSX engine. Before talking about this specific implementation, let me explain what a worker is and how taskcluster-worker differs from docker-worker, the currently main worker in Taskcluster.

One of my goals for 2016 Q1 was to write a monitoring dashboard for Taskcluster. It basically pings Taskcluster services to check if they are alive and also acts as a feed aggregator for services Taskcluster depends on. One problem with this approach is the same origin policy, in which web pages are only allowed to make requests to their own domain. For web servers which is safe to make these cross domain requests, they can either implement jsonp or CORS. CORS is the preferred way so we will focus on it for this post.

This post is about our plans for representing Taskcluster tasks inside the gecko tree. Jonas, Dustin and I had a discussion in Berlin about this, here I summarize what we have so far. We currently store tasks in an yaml file and they translate to json format using the mach command. The syntax we have now is not the most flexible one, it is hard to parameterize the task and very difficulty to represents tasks relationships.

In this post I am going to talk about my work for phone builds inside the Taskcluster infrastructure. Mozilla is slightly moving from Buildbot to Taskcluster. Here I am going to give a survivor guide on Firefox OS phone builds.

So far I have been a heavy git user, but since I joined Mozilla I have given Mercurial a try. I must say that migrating from Subversion to git was far less painful than from git to Mercurial. I think there are a few reasons for that:

B2G has a built-in profiler that you can use to find hot spots in your app. The process is made easy by the profile.sh script, which helps you to generate a profile file for upload to the Cleopatra application.