F = T ∇ Sτ

Securing connections is always a good idea and OpenSSL provides a number of handy ways to do it. Blocking OpenSSL API is the most easiest to use and it could provide a working solution in no time, however it doesn't work with wxWidgets library so smooth as one may hope. I spent some time to find the reason why my application doesn't work as intended (plain sockets work just fine though) and had to do a little research on that matter. Regardless of the flags you provide to wxSocketServer it always creates a socket on the new connection with that ioctl call (UnblockAndRegisterWithEventLoop function in include/wx/unix/private/sockunix.h): ioctl(m_fd, FIONBIO, &trueArg); Basically, it just makes the socket non-blocking. I don't know is it a bug or feature, but we have it now and have to deal with it. Naturally all blocking OpenSSL API doesn't work and we have to develop the code using non-blocking behaviour. However, it's pretty easy to use if we emulate th

Running GC-based languages on embedded systems always give a challenge to limit the physical memory amount taken by the processes. Python scripting is obviously a good example what would happen if you use long-running processes and which problems you could face. Let me show my research and the way I've used to fix the memory consumption. First, a trivial example which is used in the Internet, and which is actually wrong and doesn't show the problem: import gc import os iterations = 1000000 pid = os.getpid() def rss():     with open('/proc/%d/status' % pid, 'r') as f:         for line in f:             if 'VmRSS' in line:                 return line def main():     print 'Before allocating ', rss(),     l = []     for i in xrange(iterations):         l.append({})     print 'After allocating  ', rss(),     # Ignore optimizations, just try to free whatever possible     # First kill     for i in xrange(iteration

Embedded system development always poses certain challenges and one of them is the threading support. Including POSIX threads (pthread) is not an option sometimes, but fortunately Linux kernel allows to make LWP (light-weight processes) which are similar to threads. The key function here is the  clone  function. fork internally uses clone too, but clone allows to create child processes with the different settings including  CLONE_VM (share the memory between parent and children processes) which is essential for threading. Without further ado let me give an example, and I'll describe key pieces below: //Linux light-weight processes usage example #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <fcntl.h> #include <sched.h> #include <stdarg.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <sys/syscall.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/wait.h> // Default thread number #define THREAD_NUM 5 int message(const char *format, ...