Firecracker: lightweight virtualisation for serverless applications, Agache et al., NSDI'20 Finally the NSDI'20 papers have opened up to the public (as of last week), and what a great looking crop of papers it is. We looked at a couple of papers that had pre-prints available last week, today we'll be looking at one of the … Continue reading Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications
Tag: Operating Systems
Papers relating to operating system design and implementation.
A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space
A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space, Bittman et al., HotStorage 2019. This is a companion paper to the "persistent problem" piece that we looked at earlier this week, going a little deeper into the object pointer representation choices and the mapping of a virtual object space into physical address spaces. ...software … Continue reading A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space
A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM
A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM Bittman et al., PLOS'19 At the start of November I was privileged to attend HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) conference in Asilomar. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it. It’s a comparatively small gathering with a great mix of people, and fabulous … Continue reading A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM
A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices
A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices Hu et al., ASPLOS'19 I’ve chosen another energy-related paper to end the week, addressing a problem many people can relate to: apps that drain your battery. LeaseOS borrows the concept of a lease from distributed systems, but with a rather nice twist, and is able … Continue reading A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices
CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment
CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment Davis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we saw the benefits of rethinking memory and pointer models at the hardware level when it came to object storage and compression (Zippads). CHERI also rethinks the way that pointers and memory work, but … Continue reading CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment
Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy
Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy Tsai & Sanchez, ASPLOS'19 Last time out we saw how Google have been able to save millions of dollars though memory compression enabled via zswap. One of the important attributes of their design was easy and rapid deployment across an existing fleet. Today’s paper introduces … Continue reading Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy
Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers
Software-defined far memory in warehouse-scale computers Lagar-Cavilla et al., ASPLOS'19 Memory (DRAM) remains comparatively expensive, while in-memory computing demands are growing rapidly. This makes memory a critical factor in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large compute clusters, or as Google like to call them "Warehouse-scale computers (WSCs)." This paper describes a "far memory" … Continue reading Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys'19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been wondering what we can do about them. When a side-channel is based on observing improved performance, a solution that removes the improved performance can work, but is clearly undesirable. … Continue reading Time protection: the missing OS abstraction
Unikernels as processes
Unikernels as processes Williams et al., SoCC'18 Ah, unikernels. Small size, fast booting, tiny attack surface, resource efficient, hard to deploy on existing cloud platforms, and undebuggable in production. There’s no shortage of strong claims on both sides of the fence. See for example: Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud Jitsu: just-in-time summoning of … Continue reading Unikernels as processes
LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation
LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation Shan et al., OSDI'18 One of the interesting trends in hardware is the proliferation and importance of dedicated accelerators as general purposes CPUs stopped benefitting from Moore’s law. At the same time we’ve seen networking getting faster and faster, causing us to rethink some of the … Continue reading LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation
the morning paper 