Tag
atomicity
- Jul 18, 2026 Dual-Bank Slots and How a Bootloader Picks One Why two firmware slots turn an in-place overwrite into a recoverable operation, how the boot decision is made from metadata, and what the doubling of flash costs. embedded systems
- Jun 26, 2026 Copy-on-Write and Block Shadowing Instead of a Log How never modifying a reachable block replaces journal replay with a root pointer swap, and what the tree-copying cost buys in atomicity. filesystems
- Mar 21, 2026 Shadow Paging and Copy-on-Write Trees How writing a modified page to a new location instead of in place makes every update atomic, what the pointer-update protocol must flush, and how the space cost accumulates until a collection pass reclaims it. memory systems
- Jan 9, 2026 Masking Interrupts, Priorities, and Exclusive Access Without an OS The three mechanisms a bare-metal core offers for making a shared update atomic, what each one costs, and how to pick between them per invariant. embedded systems
- Nov 20, 2025 Logical Block Size, Read-Modify-Write, and Misaligned I/O Why a device with 4 KiB pages can still accept 512-byte sectors, what that emulation costs internally, and how alignment and atomicity guarantees interact. filesystems
- Jun 17, 2025 Specifying Partial Failure, Atomicity, and Retry Semantics How a contract states what survives a crash mid-operation, why idempotency keys must be chosen by the caller, and where at-least-once delivery forces deduplication. software engineering
- May 6, 2025 Atomic Read-Modify-Write and the Mutual Exclusion Problem Why a flag plus a check cannot keep two threads out of the same critical section, and what a single indivisible read-modify-write instruction changes about the problem. operating systems
- Mar 20, 2025 Erase Granularity, Write Ordering, and Power Loss During a Flash Write Why a firmware update cannot be made atomic at the byte level, how sector granularity dictates the update algorithm, and what a partially erased sector actually contains. embedded systems
- Mar 17, 2025 Install Sessions: Atomicity Across Multiple Split APKs How the installer stages a set of APKs as one transaction, what commit guarantees about visibility, and what happens to a half-written session when the device reboots. mobile computing
- Jul 17, 2024 Read-Modify-Write Hazards in Peripheral Registers Why assigning through a bit-set idiom corrupts registers the hardware also writes, how write-one-to-clear flags interact with that idiom, and what surrogate registers buy. embedded systems
- Dec 20, 2023 Rename Atomicity and the Replacement of a Directory Entry How rename changes two directory entries without a window of invisibility, which cross-filesystem cases the guarantee excludes, and why the call is the primitive behind atomic file updates. filesystems
- Oct 2, 2023 Write Ordering and the Crash Window Between Metadata Updates Why a filesystem that issues correct writes in the right order can still be corrupt after a power loss, and how ordering constraints, atomicity, and recovery strategies separate. filesystems