Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures - Popek & Goldberg 1974. With thanks to Alfred Bratterud for pointing me at this paper. What exactly is a virtual machine? What does a virtual machine monitor do? And how do we now whether a given piece of hardware can support virtualization or not? In today's paper … Continue reading Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures
Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World
Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World - Clebsch et al. 2015 Yesterday we looked at the reference capability based type system of the Pony language. Pony is a safe (data race free), fast actor language. Today we're looking at another aspect of how Pony achieves its speed and clean programming … Continue reading Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World
Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors
Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors - Clebsch et al. 2015 Do you remember Herb Sutter's 'The Free Lunch is Over' article? (Hard to believe that was written over 11 years ago!). Herb Sutter also posted a great update in 2012, 'Welcome to the Jungle'. In the conclusion of that piece Sutter writes: Mainstream hardware … Continue reading Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors
Capability Myths Demolished
Capability Myths Demolished - Miller et. al 2003 Pretty much everyone is familiar with an ACL-based approach to security. Despite having been around for a very long time, the capabilities approach to security is less well-known. Today's paper choice provides an excellent introduction to the capabilities model and how it compares to ACLs. Along the … Continue reading Capability Myths Demolished
A Short Note on Atomicity and Ordering
Just a short observation to start the week this week, inspired by the All File Systems are Not Created Equal paper that we looked at last week. Atomicity (or lack thereof) and (re-)ordering are common issues that crop up again and again in different guises to cause us problems in systems. It all boils down … Continue reading A Short Note on Atomicity and Ordering
Using Crash Hoare Logic for Certifying the FSCQ File System
Using Crash Hoare Logic for Certifying the FSCQ File System - Chen et. al 2015 If you found yesterday's look at POSIX file system semantics and the crash recovery of applications built on top a little sobering, then today's paper offers a glimpse of a light at the end of the tunnel. Chen et al. … Continue reading Using Crash Hoare Logic for Certifying the FSCQ File System
All File Systems are Not Created Equal: On the Complexity of Crafting Crash Consistent Applications
All File Systems are Not Created Equal: On the Complexity of Crafting Crash Consistent Applications - Pillai et al. 2014 Last week we looked at Reducing Crash Recoverability to Reachability for file system-based applications. Today's choice predates that work and investigates the semantics of real world file systems and how this affects applications that run … Continue reading All File Systems are Not Created Equal: On the Complexity of Crafting Crash Consistent Applications
How Complex Systems Fail
How Complex Systems Fail - Cook 2000 This is a wonderfully short and easy to read paper looking at how complex systems fail - it's written by a Doctor (MD) in the context of systems of patient care, but that makes it all the more fun to translate the lessons into complex IT systems, including … Continue reading How Complex Systems Fail
The Heard-Of Model: Computing in Distributed Systems with Benign Failures
The Heard-Of Model: Computing in Distributed Systems with Benign Failures - Charron-Bost & Schiper2007 We briefly touched on the Heard-Of model last week when we looked at PSync. It's really very elegant, so today I thought it would be good to take a closer look. The traditional view of fault-tolerant distributed systems makes the following … Continue reading The Heard-Of Model: Computing in Distributed Systems with Benign Failures
Chapar: Certified Causally Consistent Distributed Key-Value Stores
Chapar: Certified Causally Consistent Distributed Key-Value Stores - Lesani et al. 2016 Another POPL '16 paper today. The Chapar framework provides for modular verification of causal consistency for both causally consistent key-value store implementations and for client programs written to use them. §1 also wins the prize for best use of emojis in a research … Continue reading Chapar: Certified Causally Consistent Distributed Key-Value Stores
the morning paper 