News for Developers

drgn: How the Linux Kernel Team at Meta Debugs the Kernel at Scale

drgn (pronounced “dragon”) is a debugger that exposes the types and variables in a program for easy, expressive scripting in Python. The Linux kernel team at Meta originally built drgn to make it easier to investigate the kinds of difficult Linux kernel bugs that the team encounters at Meta. The team has since added further use cases for it, like...

Open Source 2021

December 9, 2021

Async stack traces in folly: Improving debugging in the developer lifecycle

This article was written by Lee Howes and Kenny Yu from Facebook. This is the final post in a series covering how we have used C++ coroutines at Facebook to regain stack traces for dependent chains of asynchronous waiting tasks. In previous blogs of this series, we have described how we implement async stack traces in folly, on top of C++’s...

Developer Tools Open Source

October 21, 2021

fs-verity support in btrfs: Detect tampering in critical read-only files

fs-verity is a Linux filesystem feature that provides significant support for ensuring the integrity and authenticity of a read-only file in an otherwise writable filesystem. It was originally built to authenticate the contents of app package (apk) files on Android devices using ext4 and f2fs filesystems. Facebook plans to use it for authenticating...

Open Source 2021

October 19, 2021

Async Stack Traces for C++ Coroutines in Folly: Walking the async stack

This article was written by Lee Howes and Lewis Baker from Facebook. This is the fourth in a series of posts covering how we have used C++ coroutines at Facebook to regain stack traces for dependent chains of asynchronous waiting tasks. In the previous post we built on the basic async stack trace data structures to automatically build the linked...

Developer Tools Open Source

October 14, 2021

Async stack traces in folly: Forming an async stack from individual frames

This article was written by Lee Howes and Lewis Baker from Facebook. This is the third in a series of posts covering how we have used C++ coroutines at Facebook to regain stack traces for dependent chains of asynchronous waiting tasks. In the previous post in the series, we looked at the difference between synchronous and asynchronous stacks and...

Developer Tools Open Source

September 30, 2021

Async stack traces in folly: Synchronous and asynchronous stack traces

This article was written by Lee Howes and Lewis Baker from Facebook. This is the second in a series of posts covering how we have used C++ coroutines at Facebook to regain stack traces for dependent chains of asynchronous waiting tasks. In the previous blog post we talked about the work we have done to implement stack traces for asynchronous...

Developer Tools Open Source

September 23, 2021

Below: a time travelling resource monitoring tool

In this blog post we introduce below, an Apache 2.0 licensed resource monitor for modern Linux systems. below was designed and developed by the resource control team at Facebook to view and record historical Linux system data. The resource control team, as the name suggests, is responsible for resource management of Linux systems at scale. ...

Open Source 2021

September 21, 2021

Async stack traces in folly: Introduction

This article was written by Lee Howes and Lewis Baker from Facebook. Facebook’s infrastructure is highly distributed and relies heavily on asynchronous programming. Most of our services that are written in C++ are implemented using async programming frameworks like folly::Futures and folly::coro. Async programming is an important tool for scaling a...

Developer Tools Open Source

September 16, 2021

Rust Nibbles - Gazebo: The rest of the tent

This article was written in collaboration with Neil Mitchell, a Software Engineer in the Developer Infrastructure organization at Facebook. The Rust library Gazebo contains a collection of well-tested Rust utilities in the form of standalone modules. In this series of blog posts, we will cover some of the modules that make up the Gazebo library....

Open Source 2021

August 10, 2021