Modern Linux Tracing & Windows internals for linux kernel developers

Its time for yet another exciting meetup session!
The lectures in this session will be given by Sasha Goldshtein.
Sasha is the CTO of Sela Group, a training and consulting company based in Israel that employs over 400 developers world-wide. Most of Sasha's work revolves around performance optimization, production debugging, and low-level system diagnostics, but he also dabbles in mobile application development on iOS and Android. Sasha is the author of two books and three Pluralsight courses, and a contributor to multiple open-source projects. He blogs at http://blog.sashag.net (http://blog.sashag.net/).

This time our meetup is hosted by Checkpoint at their office in Tel Aviv.
The event will be held at a conference room on the ground floor (Pink conference room).

Brief:
In this meetup we will talk about Modern tracing and Windows internals.
Tracing is one of the most important debugging tools for kernel development. The tracing mechanisms in kernel are getting a lot of new features. I recommend that you try and think on debugging issues that you had while developing in the kernel and see how the new tracing features can help you.
The windows internals lecture will give an interesting overview of how the things that we all know and love in the linux kernel are implemented in windows.

The schedule for this meetup is:
19:00-19:15 mingling time
19:15-20:15 Modern Linux Tracing Landscape (Lecture + Q&A)
20:15-20:25 break
20:25-21:25 Windows Internals for Linux Kernel Developers (Lecture + Q&A)

Modern Linux Tracing Landscape

The Linux kernel has multiple "tracers" built-in, with various degrees of support for aggregation, dynamic probes, parameter processing, filtering, histograms, and other features. Starting from the venerable ftrace, introduced in kernel 2.6, all the way through eBPF, which is still under development, there are many options to choose from when you need to statically instrument your software with probes, or diagnose issues in the field using the system's dynamic probes. Modern tools include SystemTap, SysDig, ktap, perf, bcc, and others. In this talk, we will begin by reviewing the modern tracing landscape -- ftrace, perf_events, kprobes, uprobes, eBPF -- and what insight into system activity these tools can offer. Then, we will look at specific examples of using tracing tools for diagnostics: tracing a memory leak using low-overhead kmalloc/kfree instrumentation, diagnosing a CPU caching issue using perf stat, probing network and block I/O latency distributions under load, or merely snooping user activities by capturing terminal input and output.

Windows Internals for Linux Kernel Developers

The Windows kernel has a honorable history of more than a quarter of a century. Since its inception in 1989, Windows NT supported a variety of modern OS features -- symmetric multiprocessing, interrupt prioritization, virtual memory, deferred interrupt processing, and many others. In this talk, targeted for Linux kernel developers, we will highlight the key features of the Windows NT kernel that are interesting or different from Linux's perspective. We will begin with a brief overview of processes, threads, and virtual memory on Windows. Next, we will talk about interrupt handling, interrupt priorities (IRQLs), bottom-half processing (DPC, APC, kernel worker threads, kernel thread pool), and I/O request flow. Among other things, we will look at device driver structure on Windows, application to driver communication (handles, IOCTLs), and the logical \DosDevices filesystem. Finally, we will discuss some features introduced in newer Windows versions, such as user-mode drivers (UMDF).

Notes:

• The lectures will be filmed and the video will be uploaded to youtube (subscribe to kerneltlv channel on youtube!)
• The lectures will start at the specified hours so please don't be late.
• All the lectures will be in Hebrew.

P.S
I'm always looking for new lectures so if you think you have what it takes and want to give a lecture at when of our meetups just let me know :)

And as always I am waiting to see all of you guys. If I'm lucky maybe even see a few new faces.

Cheers,
Kfir.