Dynamic memory allocation c programming - memory

First year students of an institute are informed to report anytime between 25.4 and 423 Create a program to allocate block and room number. Consider Five blinck wel 1000 rooms/block. Room allocation starts from Block A on first-come, first-served it is full, then subsequent blocks will be allocated. Define a structure with appropriate mutes and create functions i. to read student's detail ii. allocate block and room. iii. print function to display student's regno, block name and room number. In main method.create at least two structure variables and use those defined functions. Inte sample input and expected output

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In how many ways we can create a PS file in Mainframes?

How many ways we can create A PS file using jcl.strong text
z/OS supports a couple of different data set organizations, short DSORGs. Data set organizations are
Physical Sequential, DSORG=PS
Partitioned Organized, DSORG=PO. There are two subtypes: PDS and PDS/E
Direct Access, DSORG=DA
Virtual Storage Access Method (the name is irritating, it is a DISK data set), DSORG=VS. There are a couple of subtypes.
The creation of a new data set is called allocation. Allocation is finally performed by calling internal system services. That means, you can code an assembler of C program to offer the allocation of a new data set. Therefore, the number of ways is unlimited.
However, the following ways are offered by z/OS, so you don't need to write a program on your own.
1. JCL
You can allocate a new PS, PO, or DA data set with JCL keywords on a DD statement. The main indicator that you want to allocate a new data set is DISP=(NEW,...). (Any other DISP= option allocates an existing data set.) The keyword DSORG= determines the type of data set. If it is omitted, the keyword SPACE= determines whether a PS or a PDS is allocated. If SPACE=specifies primary, secondary, and directory space amounts, a PDS is allocated, else a PS.
With limitations, you can also allocate a new VSAM data set with JCL keywords.
2. TSO/E
You can use the TSO/E ALLOC command to do (almost) the same as with JCL DD statement keywords (see above). Again, the keyword DISP(NEW,...) is used to allocate a new data set.
3. ISPF
You can use ISPF panels in a TSO/E session to allocate a new data sets.
4. Program IDCAMS
You can run program IDCAMS in a batch job to allocate a new data set. This is the preferred method to allocate VSAM data sets.
Other
There are possibilites, depending on the tools that are available at your installation.
Note that members of PDS, and PDS/E data sets are *not allocated. Once a PDS, or PDS/E has been allocated, members can be created. But we do not say "allocate a member". A new allocation is tied to reserving some disk space for he data set. Members make use of that space.
There is more behind allocation; too much to write it all down here.

Where are NVMe commands located inside the PCIe BAR?

According to the NVMe specification, the BAR has tail and head fields for each queue. For example:
Submission Queue y Tail Doorbell (SQyTDBL):
Start: 1000h + (2y * (4 << CAP.DSTRD))
End: 1003h + (2y * (4 << CAP.DSTRD))
Submission Queue y Head Doorbell (SQyHDBL):
Start: 1000h + ((2y + 1) * (4 << CAP.DSTRD))
End: 1003h + ((2y + 1) * (4 << CAP.DSTRD))
Are there the queue itself or just mere pointers? Is this correct? If it is the queue, I would assume the DSTRD indicates the maximum length of all queues.
Moreover, the specification talks about two optional regions: Host Memory Buffer (HMB) and Controller Memory Buffer (CMB).
HMB: a region within the host's DRAM (PCIe root)
CMB: a region within the NVMe controller's DRAM (inside the SSD)
If both are optional, where is it located then? Since endpoint PCIe only works with BARs and PCI Headers, I don't see any other place they might be located, other than a BAR.
Sorry but I am doing this from memory but I have implemented an FPGA NVMe host so hopefully my memory will be enough to answer your questions and more, if I get something wrong though at least you know why. I'll be providing reference sections from the specification which you can find here. https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVM-Express-1_4-2019.06.10-Ratified.pdf Also as a note before I really answer your question I want to clarify some confusion, understanding the spec takes some time I honestly recommend reading it bottom to top the last few sections help give context for the first few as strange as that sounds.
These are the submission and completion queues, specifically the subqueue tail and completion queue head respectively (SECTION 3.1). More on this later I just wanted to correct the missconception that you access the submission queue head as the host, you do not only the controller (traditionally the drive) does. A simple reminder submission is you asking the drive to do something, completion is the drive telling you how it went. Read SECTION 7.2 for more info.
Before you can send anything to these queues you must first setup said queues. Baseline in the system these queues do not exist, you must use the admin queue to set them up.
28h 2Fh ASQ Admin Submission Queue Base Address
30h 37h ACQ Admin Completion Queue Base Address
Your statement about DSTRD is a huge miss understanding. This field is from the capabilities register (0x0) Figure 3.1.1. This field is the controller (drive) telling you the "doorbell stride" which says how many bytes are between each doorbell, I've never seen a drive report anything but 0 for this value since well, why would you want to leave dead space between doorbell registers.
Please be careful with the size of your writes, in my experience most NVMe drives require you to send writes of at least 2dwords (8 bytes) even if you only intend to send 1dword of data, just a note.
Onto actually helping you use this thing as a host, please reference SECTION 7.6.1 to find the initialization sequence. Notice how you must setup multiple registers, read certain parameters and other such things.
Assuming you or someone else has done initalization let me now answer the core of your question, how to use these queues. The thing is, this answer spans MANY sections of the spec and is the core of it. So with that I am going to break it down as best I can for a simple write command. Please note you CANNOT write, until you have first created the queues using the admin queues which leverage different opcodes from a different section of the spec, sorry I cannot write all of this out.
STEPS TO WRITING DATA TO AN NVMe DRIVE.
In the creation of the submission queue you will specify the size of this specific queue. This is the number of commands that can be placed in the queue at one time for processing. Along with this you will specify the queue base address. So for this example let's assume you set the base address to 0x1000_0000 and size 16 (0x10). Figure 105 let's us know that every submission queue entry has a size of 64bytes (0x40) so queue entry 0 is at 0x1000_0000 entry 1 is at 0x1000_0040 2 0x1000_0080 and so on for our 16 entries then it loops back.
You will first store data for writing, let's say you were given 512bytes (0x200) of data to write. So for simplicity you place that data at 0x2000_0000 - 0x2000_0200.
You create the submission queue command. This is not a simple process. I'm not going to document all of this for you but understand you should be referencing Figure 104, Figure 346, and Section 6.15. This is not enough however. You will also need to understand PRP vs SGL and which you are using (PRP is easier to start with). NLB (Number of logical blocks) which determine your write size, with NVMe you do not specify writes in bytes but in terms of NLBs which the size is specified by the controller (drive), it may implement multiple NLB sizes but this is up to the drive not you as the host, you just get to pick from what it supports Section 5.15.2.1, Figure 245 You want to look at identify namespace to tell you the LBA (logical block address) size, this will lead you down a rabbit hole to determine the actual size but that's ok the info is there.
Ok so you finished this mess and have created the submission command. Let's assume the host has already completed 2 commands on this queue (at start this will be 0 I'm picking 2 just to be clearer in my example). What you now need to do is place this command at 0x1000_0080.
Now let's assume this is queue 1 (from the equation you posted the queue number is the y value. Note that queue 0 is the admin queue). What you need to do is poke the controllers submission queue tail doorbell to say how many commands are now loaded (thus you can queue multiple up at once and only tell the drive when you are ready to). In this case the number is 2. So you need to write the value 2 to register 0x1008.
At this point the drive will go. aha, the host has told me there are new commands to fetch. So the controller will go to queue base address + commandsize*2 and fetch 64bytes of data aka 1 command (address 0x1000_0080). The controller will decode this command as a write which means the controller (drive) must read data from some address and put it in memory where it was told to. This means your write command should tell the drive to go to address 0x2000_0000 and read 512 bytes of data, and it will if you scope the PCIe bus. At this point the drive will fill out a completion queue entry (16 bytes specified at Section 4.6) and place it in the completion queue address you specified at queue creation (plus 0x20 since this is the 2nd completion). Then the controller will generate and MSI-X interrupt.
At this point you must go to wherever the completion queue was placed and read the response to check status, and also if you queued multiple submissions check the SQID to see what finished since jobs can finish out of order. You then must write to the completion queue head (0x100C) to indicate that you have retrieved the completion queue (success or failure). Notice here you never interact with the submission queue head (that's up to the controller since only he knows when the submission queue entry was processed) and only the controller places things in the completion queue tail since only he can create new entries.
I'm sorry this is so long and not well formatted but hopefully you now have a slightly better understanding of NVMe, it's a bit of a mess at first but once you get it it all makes sense. Just remember my example assumed you had created a queue which baseline doesn't exist. First you need to setup the admin submission and completion queues (0x28 and 0x30) which has queue ID 0 thus it's tail/head doorbell is address 0x1000,0x1004 respectively. You then must reference Section 5 to find the opcodes to make stuff happen but I have faith you can figure it out from what I've given you. If you have any more questions put a comment down and I'll see what I can do.

Dask dashboard profile tab usage (a.k.a. Flame graph)

How do you interpret this piece of tetris to study the usage of your application?
The display is a flame graph corresponding to statistical profiling of the workers. The whole CPU effort is the x-axis of the set of colourful blocks, and as you travel upwards, you are moving deeper in the call stack, e.g.,
a block, Function A, that takes up 50% of the horizontal space used up 50% of the CPU time across all the Dask threads in the cluster
let's say that above that block, two blocks each take up 20% of the whole, and the rest of the lower block is not covered: the time spent calling function A consisted of time to call these two lower-level functions, plus a bit of internal time within Function A.
You can get information about the function corresponding to each block by mousing over.
Note that some function call stacks can be very deep, e.g., pandas processing.
You can also select which submitted function you are looking at the profile for (top), or select from the overall CPU utilisation timeline (bottom).

Flash Memory Management

I'm collecting data on an ARM Cortex M4 based evaluation kit in a remote location and would like to log the data to persistent memory for access later.
I would be logging roughly 300 bytes once every hour, and would want to come collect all the data with a PC after roughly 1 week of running.
I understand that I should attempt to minimize the number of writes to flash, but I don't have a great understanding of the best way to do this. I'm looking for a resource that would explain memory management techniques for this kind of situation.
I'm using the ADUCM350 which looks like it has 3 separate flash sections (128kB, 256kB, and a 16kB eeprom).
For logging applications the simplest and most effective wear leveling tactic is to treat the entire flash array as a giant ring buffer.
define an entry size to be some integer fraction of the smallest erasable flash unit. Say a sector is 4K(4096 bytes); let the entry size be 256.
This is to make all log entries be sector aligned and will allow you to erase any sector without cuting a log entry in half.
At boot, walk the memory and find the first empty entry. this is the 'write_pointer'
when a log entry is written, simply write it to write_pointer and increment write_pointer.
If write_pointer is on a sector boundary erase the sector at write_pointer to make room for the next write. essentially this guarantees that there is at least one empty log entry for you to find at boot and allows you to restore the write_pointer.
if you dedicate 128KBytes to the log entries and have an endurance of 20000 write/erase cycles. this should give you a total of 10240000 entries written before failure. or 1168 years of continuous logging...

Interview: System/API design

This question was asked in one of the big software company. I have come up with a simple solution and I want to know what others feel about the solution.
You are supposed to design an API and a backend for a system that can
allot phone numbers to people living in a city. The phone numbers will
start from 111-111-1111 and end at 999-999-9999. The API should enable
the clients (people in the city) to do the following:
When a client requests for a phone number, it allots one of the available numbers to them.
Some clients may want fancy numbers, so they can specifically ask for a number to be alloted to them. If the requested number is
available then the system allots it to them, otherwise the system
allots any available number.
The system need not have to know which number is alloted to which
client. The same client may make successive requests and get multiple
phone numbers for himself, but the system is not bothered. At any
point of time, the system only knows which phone numbers are alloted
and which phone numbers are free.
The numbers from 111-111-1111 to 999-999-9999 roughly corresponds to 8 billion numbers. Assuming that memory is not a constraint, I can think of the following two approaches (which are almost similar).
Maintain a huge boolean array of length 8 billion and have a next pointer that points to an array index (next is initialized to zero). If the value pointed by next is not free, then forward next until a free number is found. When fancy numbers are requested, just check whether the corresponding index position is free and return the number. The downside of this approach is, when allocating numbers in a regular way, if there is a huge chunk (say 1 billion) numbers in the middle that was allocated by fancy allocation, then the next pointer has to be moved 1 billion times.
To overcome the difficulty mentioned in the previos design, we can use some sort of a linked hashmap. We maintain a doubly linked list (this replaces the array in the previous design) and another array of the same length as the list where each element of the array points to a corresponding element in the list. So when allocating numbers in regular method, we advance a pointer in the linked list and mark nodes as and when we allocate (same as the previous method). When allocating fancy numbers, we can directly find the node in the list that corresponds to the special number requested by first indexing into the array and the following the pointer. Once the node is identified, short circuit the previous node and the next node so that we do not have to skip the used numbers one by one (which was the problem with the previous approach) when doing a regular allocation.
Let me know whether I am on the right track. Please enlighten me with any important details that I am missing.
You can do significantly better in the anser to this question.
First you should design you API. The one recommended by Icarus3 is perfectly good:
string acquireNextAvailableNumber();
boolean acquireRequestedNumber(string special);
The second one returns true (and reserves the number) if it is available, otherwise returns false.
The question doesn't specify how you allocate phone numbers, so allocate them to suit yourself. Make the first 'next available' request return "111-111-1111", the next "111-111-1112" etc. This means you can record all the numbers allocated through 'next' by just remembering the last one allocated. (You'll need to ask whether '111-111-1119" is followed by "111-111-1120" or 111-111-1121", but that's the sort of thing you should be asking anyway. In any case, the important thing is you can work out what is the next number knowing the last allocated one.)
Special requests you will need to store individually. A hash table work, but so does a BST or simply an ordered list. It depends on what tradeoffs you want between space and speed, and how often special numbers are likely to be requested. I'll use a BST (ordered by the number) in the rest of this, for reasons I'll come to.
So, how do you code this? For the next allocated number:
Look at the last allocated number, and find the next in sequence.
Check that number hasn't been allocated as a special number. You can do this very quickly with a BST because if it's there, it will be the lowest entry in the BST.
If the number was in the 'special numbers' database, increment the 'allocated numbers' value (to include that number) and remove the entry from the special numbers. Then repeat this process until you get a number that isn't in the special numbers.
Note that this process ensures that all 'special numbers' lower than the last one allocated by 'next' do not appear in the special numbers database. As the 'last normal number allocated' increases, it absorbs any special numbers allocated that were less than that, removing them from the table. This is what ensures that when we ask whether the next number in sequence is in the special numbers database, we only have to look at the lowest entry.
Checking for a special number is easy. If it is lower than the last 'normal' number allocated it isn't available. Otherwise you check to see if it exists in the BST. If it doesn't, you add it to the BST.
You can optimize this process by storing not just single numbers in the BST, but storing ranges of numbers. If the allocated special numbers are dense, then it reduces the amount of space in the tree and the number of accesses to find if one is in there. During the test to find if the 'next' number discovers a rnage of size n, then you can immediately increment the highest normal number by n, instead of having to go round the loop n times.
First, you did not prototype your APIs. For example, if I have to design these APIs I will publish 2 APIs.
string acquireNextAvailableNumber();
string acquireRequestedNumber(string special);
Second, you need to decide how you are going to implement it. code driven or data driven ?
You can maintain hash for all these numbers ( it will consume memory ) and quickly query the availability of the number. Or
you could maintain single list to store only distributed numbers ( less memory ). So, whenever request comes, you start searching 1 to n numbers in that list ( increased time-complexity ). if any first (or requested) number isn't there then you allocate it to client and add that entry in the list.
As, there are billion numbers, you will need to consider the trade-off between space and time.
You could also take the advantage of the database.
To enhance previous answers, any BST may not be good enough as insertions or deletions can make it unbalanced. A balanced BST, e.g. Red-Black Tree, should be a good choice.
So, a Red-Black Tree can be created and filled in the beginning to represent available numbers, and each allocation should remove an element from it.
init(from, to) - can be done in O(n) time, a straightforward implementation would be O(n log n). But that is a one-time initialization on your server's start
acquireNextAvailableNumber() - should remove smallest element, time cost O(1)
acquireRequestedNumber(special) - should make a search and remove element if found, guaranteed time cost O(log n)
In Java, a TreeSet<String> or TreeSet<Integer> could be used since it is implemented with Red-Black Tree.
The next question would probably have been that several request-processing threads would access your API, so since Java's TreeSet is not thread-safe, you should have wrapped it at initialization like so:
TreeSet numbers = init(...);
SortedSet availableNumbers = Collections.synchronizedSortedSet(numbers);

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