[Starlink] "Hunting Heisenbugs" talk Nov 14th 2:30 PM EST

[Dave Taht]

Paul McKenney, inventor of Stochastic Fair Queueing (SFQ), inventor of
RCU, solver of million year problems at IBM and now meta, and all
around good speaker, is giving a talk on "Hunting Heisenbugs" 2:30PM
EST Tuesday November 14th, 2023, at the Linux Plumbers conference.

https://lpc.events/event/17/contributions/1504/

A heisenbug is a bug that when you instrument the code to find it,
vanishes. See wikipedia for more details.

I have spent many months, and years, even - trying to turn heisenbugs
into "Bohrbugs". Bufferbloat was, originally, essentially a heisenbug,
until Tom Herbert invented BQL. Every engineer has a few in their
backlog that keeps them awake at night. I have 3 outstanding, the
biggest: I have been trying (in my spare time) for nearly a year now,
trying to find a bug in the mt76's mu-mimo stack that causes excessive
retransmits and latency under circumstances I can rarely replicate,
which is proving more elusive to find as the infamous fq-crypto bug we
had had that stalled make-wifi-fast project out for 4 horrible months,
and stumped dozens of people. It is similarly damaging for users of
that chipset, when it happens.

https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/crypto_fq_bug/

-- 
:( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos