This session will present lesser known and recently added Linux Kernel APIs which are beneficial for C/C++ programmers to improve security, performance or just introspectability of their programs.
While the usual API on Unix alike operating systems is defined by the POSIX standard, Linux extends this API and offers additional features which might be worthwhile to know while developing for this platform:
In particular, we will look into how the Linux virtual memory management layer can be influenced and queried for more fine granular information. This additional insight can be used to improve performance while iterating over large memory regions using custom C++ iterators.
Making best use of CPU caches is becoming more important to improve performance. New features in the Linux kernel allow to influence how the CPU caches are utilized by applications.
As a lookout the session will conclude with notable new features, like anonymous and sealed file descriptors and new primitives offered by Linux to construct faster concurrency control algorithms.