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.

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.

MediumTechnical

90 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

89 practiced

Write a small C function prototype and describe the implementation for: int is_little_endian(void) that returns 1 if the host is little-endian and 0 otherwise; and uint32_t to_big_endian32(uint32_t v) that returns the big-endian representation for the current host. Mention portability and strict-aliasing concerns.

EasyTechnical

68 practiced

Explain the difference between processes and threads on Linux in terms of memory sharing, file descriptor inheritance, scheduling, and lightweight process semantics. Discuss what fork() does structurally compared to clone() and why SREs need to understand these differences when diagnosing resource leaks or designing isolation.

EasyTechnical

65 practiced

Implement (describe algorithm and key checks) a safe C function: void safe_strcpy(char *dst, size_t dst_size, const char *src) that copies a null-terminated src into dst ensuring no buffer overflow and always null-terminating if dst_size > 0. State behavior for dst_size == 0 and how to test edge cases.

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