-
Apple’s spotlight and future databases
The UNIX idea that the OS treated files as sequences of uninterpreted bytes was a brilliant technical simplification – so successful that the previously dominant approach essentially disappeared. Apple seems to want to revist the issue with its spotlight product. Maybe it is time time integrate a database view into the file system, now that…
-
future of the data center
This article from Ars Technica discusses a talk over the summer by Merrill Lynch’s chief technology architect, Jeffrey Birnbaum on “stateless cloud computing” – most concretely on distributed file systems. Birnbaum believes that one of the key foundational elements of a stateless computing environment is a networked storage system that enables ubiquitous availability of software.…
-
Operating system research – 16 years perspective
(links and dates fixed March 15 2015 – thanks to Luu and pm90 at news.y.combinator for digging this up) October 2008: It’s somewhat funny and somewhat sad to read this thread on the old USENET. Starting out with Andy Tanenbaum’s proposed list of accepted truths (most of which I thought wrong at the time) GENERALLY ACCEPTED AS…
-
New paper “H2” on operating system semantics
-
clouds versus pcs
George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But, in this article, Gilder reports on some smart people. The sheer massive use of electrical…
-
linux kernel
From LinuxDevices Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers, working for more than 100 corporations. An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day. A new kernel is released approximately every 2.7 months. Since 2005, the kernel has grown at a steady pace of 10 percent…
-
what do we got to verify in an os?
From comments below. Just one more comment: I think we should make a distinction between a tool that can verify threaded code and a tool that can verify the code that implements threading. The latter is what you are looking for here and it is much more difficult. Furthermore it is arguably unnecessary — a…
-
Happy new year and validation
Updated below! Years ago I proposed the following code snippet as a minimal standard for a useful verification method. Still not quite there. /* you are not expected to understand this */ if(save()){ load_memory_management(); /* map in new current */ return; }else { current = new; resume(); panic(“RESUME RETURNED! KERNEL BROKENn”); } Not so complicated,…
-
Cell phone handsets and linux and software value
Update at the end. Two FSMLabs alumni are leading the charge for Linux handsets in two different companies. Jason Whitmire is now GM of cell phones for Wind River. Jason’s blog is here and a Linuxdevices article discusses his first post which concerns the, well, machinations of Google and the two big cell-phone consortia Limo…
-
formal methods considered harmful and more on soft real-time
[fixed a couple of typos, Dec. 20 2007] John Regehr writes: On the other hand, there is plenty of useful work to be done on supporting time sensitive applications (I’ll just avoid saying “soft real-time”) even when no guarantees are made. Let’s take the example of an OS that disables interrupts when any process is…