Professionally administering Linux is a very complex matter: it requires advanced skills on the kernel and on a lot of tools and utilities that are often combined in pipelines and scripts.

Professionals having a thorough understanding of the kernel know how to get optimal performance for specific workloads by tuning the right “knobs” and to what degree to do it. In addition to that they know what commands and tools should be used to gather all the information necessary to fix performance issues. This of course requires having a thorough understanding of the kernel scheduler, of memory allocators, of the virtual memory, the Virtual File System and so.

As anybody would expect, skilled professionals thoroughly know the Linux distribution they use – being able to install and remove software packages is absolutely not enough. They should know:

the file system standard layout used by the distro – so to honour it when installing custom software
how to create custom packages (such as RPM) to ease the installation of custom application and scripts
the peculiarities of the initialization process specific of the distribution, in order to sort out boot issues that may arise sooner or later
how to perform automated installations
how to use filesystems, partitioning and Logical Volume Management utilities to apply changes while keeping online the system

And of course a lot of other stuff.

Memory Management – The Buddy Allocator

Posted on April 9, 2021November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Every skilled professional should have an understanding of how the kernel does allocate memory: sooner or later it happens to get a system stuck complaining that it cannot allocate memory, despite the output of the "free" command showing that there's plenty of memory. This can get people confused, however this only means that the system cannot allocate kernel memory, despite it can still allocate system memory. The aim of this post is to clarify how the kernel allocates physical memory using the buddy algorithm, along with the available tools to check the state of physical memory.