Operating Systems

Papers relating to operating system design and implementation.

CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
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

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments
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

Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments
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

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments
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

Unikernels as processes

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
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

LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
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