Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

On Thursday this week I’ll be giving a talk at the 2008 Israeli Networking Seminar on “Networked I/O for Virtual Machines: Approaches and Challenges.”

Next month I’ll be returning to one of my favorite cities in the world, Boston, for the 2008 Xen Summit North America, the Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems (MMCS) and USENIX ATC.

The Operating Systems Review special issue on research and developments in the Linux kernel is shaping up quite nicely and should be going to the printers soon. All of the accepted papers are good, but some are real diamonds.

Simon L. Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury , Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland, “How to write a great research paper”.

Link via Silvia Miksch‘s excellent page of tips on how to do research.

I spent a couple of pleasant hours today trying to wrap my head around KVM’s MMU code. After reading “The Shadowy Depths of the KVM MMU”, it suddenly starts to – almost – makes sense.

The tentative agenda for the 2008 KVM forum has been published and is chock-full of awesomeness.

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.

Just registered for ASPLOS ’08 and VEE ’08, both to take place in Seattle on the first week of March. If you’ll be there, make sure to say hi!

The ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review special issue on work from IBM Research has hit the archives and is choke full of goodness. Unfortunately you need an ACM subscription or SIGOPS membership to access it.

Copies of my papers that appear in the issue can be found on the publications page as usual. These are “Vigilant—Out-of-band Detection of Failures in Virtual Machines” (with Dan Pelleg, Rick Harper, Lisa Spainhower and Tokunbo Adeshiyan), “Virtual Machine Time Travel Using Continuous Data Protection and Checkpointing” (with Paula Ta-Shma, Guy Laden, and Michael Factor), and “Open Source as a Foundation for Systems Research” (with Eric Van Hensbergen). Comments always appreciated.

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)