This blog post describes the relation ship between file names and files on Unix file systems. We’ll also look at soft links and how all this interacts with file descriptors.  Read →

This blog post describes the basic data structures involved in file I/O on Unix and Linux. We’ll go through file descriptors, open file descriptions and file buffers, and see how they relate to each other.  Read →

This is a series of blog posts to build a transaction manager in C. Last time, we looked at fault tolerance, and how to build fail-safe transactional software. In this installment, we’re going to implement support for error detection and recovery in our transaction manager simpletm. As usual, the complete example code for this blog post is available on GitHub.  Read →

This is a series of blog posts to build a transaction manager in C. Having implemented thread isolation, we will now look at error handling. Our goal is to automate error handling as much as possible and make building fault-tolerant software easy.  Read →

This is a series of blog posts to build a transaction manager in C. In this installment, we’re going to take a closer look at the different types of functions that exist and what we have to do to handle them in a transaction. We’ve already implemented support for several interfaces from the C Standard Library in our transaction manager. We’re now going to sort and formalize this a bit.  Read →