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

79 practiced

Write (describe the implementation) a robust C function that memory-maps a file read-only using mmap: void *map_readonly_file(const char *path, size_t *out_size). Include stat usage, error handling for zero-length files, and proper munmap on failure/cleanup.

EasyTechnical

93 practiced

You are on-call and a production service just crashed with SIGSEGV. List a precise, prioritized triage checklist you would execute in the first 15 minutes: commands to run, artifacts to collect (logs, core), how to quickly symbolize the stack, and short-term mitigations to restore service or reduce customer impact.

EasyTechnical

96 practiced

Explain the difference between blocking and non-blocking I/O and list standard Linux APIs for evented IO (select, poll, epoll). For a single-threaded, high-concurrency network server, discuss when SREs should prefer event-driven (epoll) designs over thread-per-connection models.

EasyTechnical

73 practiced

In C, explain the difference between pointers and arrays, including pointer arithmetic, when arrays decay to pointers, and how the sizeof operator behaves on each. For an SRE, explain why confusing the two can lead to parsing bugs or buffer overflows when handling network frames or binary protocols.

HardTechnical

83 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).

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