SEGFAULT: Debugging a crashing application

🙀 Something breaks If you use linux running some applications you could have seen sometimes a similar error message: [1] 24975 segmentation fault (core dumped) what’s meaning and how it can be useful ? Let’s dig it out. 🧪 Lab Setup To make a proper case study, we need a crashing program. Of course they are very rare nowadays 😁 so we just create a new one ourself, showing off our worst C coding bad skills and practices....

April 5, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

First steps with Linux Test Project

🕵️ Intro The Linux Test Project is a joint project started years ago by SGI, OSDL and Bull developed and now maintained by IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu, SUSE, Red Hat, Oracle and many others. The project goal is to deliver tests to the open source community that validate the reliability, robustness, and stability of Linux. In these days I’m having a journey on the project so with this article I want to show step by step how to setup the project, how tests are actually written and give you a quick and dirty guide to write your first one....

February 10, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

Introduction to packaging Rust application

🦀 Intro As an exercise, today we are going to package a game named battleship-rs developed by Orhun Parmaksız. We will also use the power of OpenSUSE build service to do most of the heavy work. Before starting, let’s check out the project: it’s hosted on github and if you want to try it out before packaging, it’s a nice game where two people can play in the terminal over a TCP network connection....

January 19, 2024 · Andrea Manzini

Fault Injection in Network Namespace and Veth Environments

Prelude This is a followup from my previous post and a sort of continuation on the series of the topic, where we are exploring ways to make our test system more “unreliable” in order to observe if our applications behave nicely under challenging and not-ideal environments. In this article we are going to explore some linux technologies: Network Namespaces (netns) Virtual Ethernet Devices (veth) Network Emulation (netem) scheduling policy The goal is to setup a virtual network link inside our system, make the two network devices talk each other and then simulate a bad/slow/glitchy/flaky communication to test how applications behave under difficult conditions....

January 6, 2024 · Andrea Manzini