I’m going to occasionally post links here that I find particularly insightful, interesting or geeky.

Three things that caught my interest today:

PowerTOP: Released by Intel, this utility builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives you a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. Turn off these apps or modify their behavior, and you’ll notice an instant increase in the battery life.

The Linux SLAB Allocator: Traditional heap memory managers suffer from fragmentation, among other issues. The SLAB Allocator in Linux, inspired by a similar implementation for Solaris and various embedded systems, allocates memory as fixed sized objects and uses caches to reduce fragmentation. It also has options to enable hardware cache alignment which allows objects in different caches to share the same cache lines, thus improving performance.

Advanced Linux Programming: After many years of coding mostly Java, I’ve been meaning to brush up on my C, Assembly and general Unix programming skills. I found this excellent book freely available online and it seems to be getting a lot of praise from reviewers on Amazon so I downloaded it. It has a lot of topics that I’m very interested in, like IPC and threads, and it even has a few assembly oriented chapters. I will definitely be reading this one