Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade
Charge for the guns' he said
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
  Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
  Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
  Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turned in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
  All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
  Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them
  Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
  All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
  Noble six hundred!

ASPLOS is going quite well so far. There were a few really interesting papers (see below). My talk went well, if I may say so myself… the slides are online.

Papers y’all should read:

Overshadow: A Virtualization-Based Approach to Retrofitting Protection in Commodity Operating Systems – Protecting an application from a malicious OS sounds counter-intuitive, but given a sufficiently smart hypervisor, it can be done. This is another step toward making the OS just another library.

Accelerating Two-Dimensional Page Walks for Virtualized Systems – How to get nested paging to perform.

The Design and Implementation of Microdrivers – Automatically split Linux kernel drivers into a performance critical part (which stays in the kernel) and a non-performance critical part which is moved to user-space.

Here’s a short list of posters from the ASPLOS ’08 combined opening reception and poster session that I found particularly interesting.

“MemCrawler: Discovering Structures in Memory” – Given a dump of physical memory, a list of interesting patterns and a list of object constraints, MemCrawler will identify kernel data structures and functions in the dump.

“Coevolution of Operating Systems and Asymmetric Single-ISA CMPs” – Not all cores and pieces of code are created equal – is it feasible to run specific pieces of operating system code (e.g., the TCP/IP stack) on smaller and less complex cores? Our ASPLOS paper explores a similar question.

“Multi-host I/O sharing by using I/O virtualization technology, ExpEther” – Extending the PCI-e bus through 10Gb ethernet. A host talks PCI-e to an FPGA which encapsulates PCI-e messages over ethernet and transmits them to a remote FPGA which decapsulates the PCI-e messages and passes them to a PCI-e endpoint. We explored similar issues with the IPOnly server. Being able to “remote” a device without needing a host (general purpose CPU) to be connected to it is pretty neat.

“Efficient Fault Tolerance in Multi-media Applications through Selective Instruction Replication” – Not all instructions are created equal. Some matter to successful completion of the program, some don’t. In media applications, Control flow is important, but manipulations on individual pixels less so. No point in replaying or replicating instructions which don’t matter.

I’m in Seattle this week for ASPLOS and VEE. My hotel room has a balcony
with a view:

Yesterday I did the touristy thing and visited the space needle,
science fiction museum and other nearby attractions. The best part of
the day was the awesome Seattle Duck
Ride. Unfortunately, my camera’s batteries decided enough is
enough just as we boarded the duck, so you get a picture of the space
needle instead.

The plan for today is to get some work done, visit the Seattle
Aquarium and otherwise have fun. ASPLOS begins tonight! For the curious, our ASPLOS paper is now online.