Niall's Weblog

I was vaguely aware that the copy of sys/queue.h on Linux systems was old. However, I’d forgotten it actually lacks some important features of the modern version shipped with BSD systems. There is a very common pattern of usage with linked lists, which the Linux version of queue.h doesn’t support too easily – iterating over [...]

I wrote the other day about porting software to Linux. I talked about some of the differences between the platforms in terms of the implementation of some well-known C library functions, and hinted at some other incompatibilities. Well, now I’m going to write about some of the other issues I encountered. There are a number [...]

This weekend I have been concentrating on improving the performance of my BitTorrent implementation. I somewhat believe in the mantra “premature optimisation is the root of all evil”, or at least, I’m not too worried about making everything super fast the first time around. Asynchronous network programs are complicated enough to write that I expected [...]

I have been making very good progress with my BitTorrent implementation recently. However, I have felt the need to make it compile out of the box under systems other than OpenBSD. The first system I have ported to is Linux, specifically Ubuntu 7.10. In doing the port, I found some interesting differences between OpenBSD and [...]