Systems Programming & Low-Level Concepts Questions
Systems programming concepts including memory management, pointers, memory layout, CPU architecture considerations, concurrency primitives, OS interactions, and performance optimization in low-level languages (C, C++). Covers how languages expose low-level resources, toolchains, and platform-specific behaviors; excludes high-level application development.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Implement (design description acceptable) a basic fixed-region memory allocator in C that manages a pre-allocated buffer with a free-list (first-fit), supporting allocator_init, allocator_alloc, and allocator_free. Discuss fragmentation, alignment, and when such an allocator might be used in SRE tooling or embedded agents.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Define undefined behavior (UB) in C and C++ and list common examples (such as out-of-bounds access, use-after-free, signed integer overflow, double-free, strict-aliasing violations). As an SRE, explain how compiler optimizations can make UB cause surprising production failures and what tools or build flags you would use to detect UB before deployment.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A service observes long-tail latency spikes that correlate with increased minor and major page faults. Outline a thorough investigation plan: which metrics and tools to collect (perf, /proc/vmstat, pagemap), kernel tunables to inspect (swappiness, THP), and mitigation strategies (madvise, prefault, mlock, tuning allocator behavior).
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how NUMA and page coloring affect memory latency and cache behavior in multi-socket servers. For an SRE, describe how to enforce NUMA-aware allocation for a high-performance native service (use of numactl, libnuma, and CPU affinity) and trade-offs involved.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Sketch the architecture and key code paths for a non-blocking TCP echo server in C that uses epoll (level-triggered) to accept connections and echo data back without blocking. Describe important checks (EAGAIN/EWOULDBLOCK), partial reads/writes handling, and FD lifecycle management.
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