keeping simple

Category: systems

  • Deterministic multithreading

    An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each thread using performance counters to construct a deterministic logical time that is used to compute…

  • parallel processing and bash reduce

    It’s sad that after all this time, one can look at any random article on parallel programming and find some variation of: for i = 1 … n create thread i do something end for as if that was the only way to express parallel computation. This is such an awkward way of looking at…

  • RTOS design and embedded system development

    Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the  POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many years. The basic programming model has not changed in years. Even FSM’s original RTOS and…

  • chrome OS

    SAN FRANCISCO — In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs based on its Chrome Web browser. The move sharpens the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of the vast majority of personal computers. NYT…

  • State machine functions and recursive composition

    My graduate school research was motivated by a difficulty we have doing real creative engineering in operating systems that may seem ridiculous to people who don’t work in the field. The problem is that we can’t describe the problem. What an operating system does is complicated beyond the expressive capability of the mathematics we have…

  • Wind River sold to Intel: more reaction

    And like Intel, I would argue that mobile software companies are instrumental in making silicon solutions pervasive, because they tick two major check boxes: reference design and support. The hidden asset of mobile software companies Mobile embedded software companies (e.g. Myriad, Access, Aplix, NXP software, Azingo) have a unique understanding of products as a hardware/software…

  • Wind River purchased by Intel

    If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point. In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and…

  • Suns tracking SGI

    IBM dropped its offer to acquire Sun for $7billion. Sun has now a series of projects for which it has large costs, but no clear method of making money. What did Sun gain from open sourcing Solaris, from giving away Java, from embracing Linux, and so on? Irving Wladawsky-Berger (whose blog is worth reading) or…

  • Program structure and threads

    Threads were initially used for telephony systems where each request to connect could be given to a new thread to manage. The simplification was, in theory, dramatic. The programmer could just write the code for handling a single line, and the OS and network code would multiplex operation over 100,000 calls. The programmer does not…

  • Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay

    Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said. Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same…