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Systems & Performance 15Security & Privacy 14Networking & Internet 7Infrastructure & DevOps 6Web & Frontend 5Hardware & Electronics 4
A large amount of fantastic open source software originates from “scratching an itch”. Such was the case with Firecracker . In 2014, Amazon launched AWS Lambda as a “serverless” compute platform: Users can provide a function — say, ten lines of Python code — and Lambda provides all of the infrastructure between an…
This paper presents an evaluation of the use of a high-level language (HLL) with garbage collection to implement a monolithic POSIX-style kernel. The goal is to explore if it is reasonable to use an HLL instead of C for such kernels, by examining performance costs, implementation challenges, and programmability and…
A glance at this year's OSDI program shows that Operating Systems are a small niche topic for this conference, not even meriting their own full session. This is unfortunate because good OS design has always been driven by the underlying hardware, and right now that hardware is almost unrecognizable from ten years ago…
Abhinav Jangda, Bobby Powers, Emery D. Berger, and Arjun Guha, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Bartek Wydrowski, Google Research; Robert Kleinberg, Google Research and Cornell; Stephen M. Rumble, Google (YouTube); Aaron Archer, Google Research
The performance of mobile phone processors has been steadily increasing, causing the performance gap between server and mobile processors to narrow with mobile processors sporting superior performance per unit energy. Fueled by the slowing of Moore’s Law, the overall performance of single-chip mobile and server…
In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications.
Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R. K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Thomas Anderson, University of Washington; Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zürich
Dan Gibson, Hema Hariharan, Eric Lance, Moray McLaren, Behnam Montazeri, Arjun Singh, Stephen Wang, Hassan M. G. Wassel, Zhehua Wu, Sunghwan Yoo, Raghuraman Balasubramanian, Prashant Chandra, Michael Cutforth, Peter Cuy, David Decotigny, Rakesh Gautam, Alex Iriza, Milo M. K. Martin, Rick Roy, Zuowei Shen, Ming Tan, Ye…
Jialin Li, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, and Dan R. K. Ports, University of Washington
There are many books available that deal with modernising legacy codebases. These books generally focus on how to go about understanding the legacy system, improving test coverage, introducing build automation, as well as strategies for refactoring or rearchitecting the codebase. However, Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It…
Data-only attacks, those that do not affect a program’s control flow, have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat. With our research, however, we have built a tool that automatically generates them with surprising ease. We explain how such attacks work, and why our tool, Einstein…
We live in an age of rapid innovation; Every year, there is a new iPhone, three new crypto currencies, five new AWS services, and a hundred new JavaScript frameworks. We have been conditioned to expect new shiny things, to the point where many people equate “new” with “better” .