Tuesday, February 22, 2011

How to Check the Version of a Linux Release

The tool uname is usually used to print the OS version on a Unix or Unix-like machine. But it does not always reveal the actual Linux distribution. For example:

myhost:/home/user$ uname -a
myhost:/home/user $ Linux myhost 2.6.32-24-generic-pae #43-Ubuntu SMP Thu Sep 16 15:30:27 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux


If this Linux distribution is LSB compliant, we can use lsb_release to get what we need:

myhost: /home/user$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release:        10.04
Codename:       lucid


Tips in Using Gcore Dump with Java Tools

When analyzing gcore dump from a running JVM process, it is very important to know which Java binary used by gcore to generate the core dump. This is because gcore may not use the Java binary on user's path. If they are different, the user will not be able to attach to the core file to the Java tool in the path. Knowing this will save you hours of frantic head scratching. More information can be found on this discussion about using gcore with jmap.

Another issue is the core file size. A 32-bit Java tool will have problem attaching to a core dump greater than 2GB in size. A workaround is to generate the gcore on a 64-bit JVM and then use the 64-bit Java tool to load the core file.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Socket and DataInputStream

While Java provides great I/O abstraction facilities like InputStream and OutputStream, the non-blocking nature of Java NIO often leads to subtle behavior differences in high-level network programming constructs.  The case in point is DataInputStream, which enables an application to parse Java primitive types right out of an input stream.  However, the stream reading methods in the DataInputStream class exhibit two distinct behaviors when the underline stream is a socket.  The following methods are non-blocking:

read(byte[] b)
read(byte[] b, int off, int len)

A non-blocking read means that the first read(byte[] b, int off, int len)may not return the expected len number of bytes.  Therefore, the reader program is usually put into a loop to read repeatedly until the len of bytes are read or the EOF is reached.

The primitive type reading methods in DataInputStream are blocking.  Take readInt() as an example.  That read will block if there are not enough bytes, 4 in this case, in the stream.

Consistency is a good software engineering principle to practice.  When using DataInputStream to parse a socket input stream, it is best to always use the primitive type reading methods to avoid confusion of blocking vs non-blocking socket I/O.