Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Special Issue on

  Research and Developments in the Linux Kernel

The Linux kernel, since its inception in 1991, has captured the
interest of many thousands of developers and millions of users. It
recently celebrated its 16th anniversary, includes many millions of
lines of code, and is used in production systems around the world. It
is also advancing at an increasingly rapid pace, undergoing many
changes every single day.

For this OSR special issue, we welcome technical papers covering the
latest advances that have been or will soon be merged into the Linux
kernel, as well as wild idea papers discussing promising experimental
work. In recognition of the current chasm that we wish to bridge, we
encourage papers from both the Linux kernel community and the research
community. The OSR issue aims to:

a) expose members of the Linux kernel community to exploratory
   research work that is going on which might influence Linux's
   evolution, and

b) expose members of the systems research community to the latest
   happenings in a mature, production kernel that is widely used and
   advancing rapidly.

Please submit papers related to all aspects of the Linux kernel. In
particular, papers are solicited for the the following areas:

* Virtualization
* I/O, networking and interconnects
* Support for multi-core and heterogeneous CPUs
* Co-existence with other operating systems
* filesystems, clustering, SSI
* Profiling, performance tuning, debugging
* Scaling up (e.g., supercomputers) and down (e.g., embedded devices)
* Experience reports
* Research directions

Submissions should be between 5 and 10 pages (in a font no smaller
than 10 pt). Standard SIGOPS formatting rules apply (see
http://www.sigops.org/osr.html). Papers should report on significant
new results or directions and include at least some material that has
not been published before. Papers will be reviewed by the guest
editors and the review committee. Accepted papers will be published in
the July 2008 issue of Operating Systems Review.

Please upload your submissions (in PDF format only) to the submissions
website, at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=osrlk2008. If
you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact
the guest editors.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: March 14th, 2008
Author notification: April 18th, 2008
Camera-ready submission deadline: May 13th, 2008

OSR guest editors:

 * Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM Haifa Research Lab 
 * Eric Van Hensbergen, IBM Austin Research Lab 
 * Marc E. Fiuczynski, Princeton University 

Review committee:

 * Patrick Bridges (University of New Mexico)
 * Angela Demke Brown (University of Toronto)
 * Hubertus Franke (IBM Research)
 * Oren Laadan (Columbia University)
 * Paul McKenney (IBM Linux Technology Center)
 * Chris Mason (Oracle)
 * Ron Minnich (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
 * Stephen C. Tweedie (Red Hat)
 * Chris Wright (Red Hat)
 * Pete Wyckoff (Ohio Supercomputer Center)

While walking the streets of Rome a month ago, I couldn’t stop thinking of Bernard Cornwell‘s Arthur series of books. For some reason, experiencing the Roman Colosseum first hand and listening to the (excellent) tour guide tell gory tales of games and slaughter, brought the Arthur books – which I’ve read and re-read, but not in recent years – vividly back to mind.

Now that we’re back home and I’ve finished re-reading all three books, I still don’t know why Rome reminded me of them. Which is not to say I didn’t stay up until the wee hours of the morning devouring them.

ASPLOS ’08 program is online. Looks exciting.

The Operating Systems Review special issue on Systems Work from IBM Research should be going to press any day. It features an editorial, two papers and an introduction by me, and lots of excellent papers from IBM Research and elsewhere.

I am still searching for the blog voice I used to have. Will let you know when I find it.