Tag: design-os
All the articles with the tag "design-os".
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System Design - How the ELF Binary Format and Program Loading Work
How the ELF binary format works on Linux: file structure, headers, sections vs segments, how the kernel loads a program via execve and load_elf_binary, dynamic linking with PLT/GOT, and the journey from ./a.out to the first instruction.
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System Design - How the Linux Virtual File System (VFS) Works
How the Linux Virtual File System works: the abstraction layer that lets Linux support ext4, XFS, tmpfs, procfs, and hundreds of other filesystems through a single unified interface. Covers inodes, dentries, superblocks, file operations, and a source code walkthrough.
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System Design - How Memory-Mapped Files (mmap) Work
How memory-mapped files (mmap) work: virtual memory mapping, page faults, kernel page cache interaction, copy-on-write semantics, and why databases love and hate them.
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System Design - How Copy-on-Write (COW) Works
How Copy-on-Write works across operating systems, databases, and filesystems: the core mechanism behind fork(), Redis snapshots, LMDB reads, B-tree databases, and modern filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS.