Two major trends in high-performance computing, namely, larger numbers of cores and the growing size of on-chip cache memory, are creating significant challenges for evaluating the design space of future processor architectures. Fast and scalable simulations are therefore needed to allow for sufficient exploration of large multi-core systems within a limited simulation time budget. By bringing together accurate high-abstraction analytical models with fast parallel simulation, architects can trade off accuracy with simulation speed to allow for longer application runs, covering a larger portion of the hardware design space. Interval simulation provides this balance between detailed cycle-accurate simulation and one-IPC simulation, allowing long-running simulations to be modeled much faster than with detailed cycle-accurate simulation, while still providing the detail necessary to observe core-uncore interactions across the entire system. Validations against real hardware show average absolute errors within 25% for a variety of multi-threaded workloads; more than twice as accurate on average as one-IPC simulation. Further, we demonstrate scalable simulation speed of up to 2.0 MIPS when simulating a 16-core system on an 8-core SMP machine.

https://users.elis.ugent.be/~leeckhou/papers/sc11.pdf

Sniper: exploring the level of abstraction for scalable and accurate parallel multi-core simulation

Table of Contents CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 WHAT IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM? 1.2 HISTORY OF OPERATING SYSTEMS 1.3 OPERATING SYSTEM CONCEPTS 1.4 SYSTEM CALLS 1.5 OPERATING SYSTEM STRUCTURE 1.6 OUTLINE OF THE REST OF THIS BOOK 1.7 SUMMARY CHAPTER 2 PROCESSES 2.1 INTRODUCTION TO PROCESSES 2.2 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION 2.3 CLASSICAL IPC PROBLEMS 2.4 SCHEDULING 2.5 OVERVIEW OF PROCESSES IN MINIX 3 2.6 IMPLEMENTATION OF PROCESSES IN MINIX 3 2.7 THE SYSTEM TASK IN MINIX 3 2.8 THE CLOCK TASK IN MINIX 3 2.9 SUMMARY CHAPTER 3 INPUT/OUTPUT 3.1 PRINCIPLES OF I/O HARDWARE 3.2 PRINCIPLES OF I/O SOFTWARE 3.3 DEADLOCKS 3.4 OVERVIEW OF I/O IN MINIX 3 3.5 BLOCK DEVICES IN MINIX 3 3.6 RAM DISKS 3.7 DISKS 3.8 TERMINALS 3.9 SUMMARY CHAPTER 4 MEMORY MANAGEMENT 4.1 BASIC MEMORY MANAGEMENT 4.2 SWAPPING 4.3 VIRTUAL MEMORY 4.4 PAGE REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS 4.5 DESIGN ISSUES FOR PAGING SYSTEMS 4.6 SEGMENTATION 4.7 OVERVIEW OF THE MINIX 3 PROCESS MANAGER 4.8 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MINIX 3 PROCESS MANAGER 4.9 SUMMARY CHAPTER 5 FILE SYSTEMS 5.1 FILES 5.2 DIRECTORIES 5.3 FILE SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION 5.4 SECURITY 5.5 PROTECTION MECHANISMS 5.6 OVERVIEW OF THE MINIX 3 FILE SYSTEM 5.7 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MINIX 3 FILE SYSTEM 5.8 SUMMARY CHAPTER 6 READING LIST AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 6.1 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 6.2 ALPHABETICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY APPENDIX A - INSTALLING MINIX 3 APPENDIX B - MINIX 3 SOURCE CODE LISTING APPENDIX C - INDEX TO FILES INDEX

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation

https://www.ece.ubc.ca/~roeed/documents/uw_loc_survey_Final.pdf

A Survey of Techniques and Challenges in Underwater Localization

Internet of Things (IoT) related applications have emerged as an important field for both engineers and researchers, reflecting the magnitude and impact of data-related problems to be solved in contemporary business organizations especially in cloud computing. This paper first provides a functional framework that identifies the acquisition, management, processing and mining areas of IoT big data, and several associated technical modules are defined and described in terms of their key characteristics and capabilities. Then current research in IoT application is analyzed, moreover, the challenges and opportunities associated with IoT big data research are identified. We also report a study of critical IoT application publications and research topics based on related academic and industry publications. Finally, some open issues and some typical examples are given under the proposed IoT-related research framework.

IoT-Based Big Data Storage Systems in Cloud Computing: Perspectives and Challenges

Recent growth in the processing and memory resources of mobile devices has fueled research within the field of mobile virtualization. Mobile virtualization enables multiple persona on a single mobile device by hosting heterogeneous operating systems (OSs) concurrently. However, adding a virtualization layer to resource-constrained mobile devices with real-time requirements can lead to intolerable performance overheads. Hardware virtualization extensions that support efficient virtualization have been incorporated in recent mobile processors. Prior to hardware virtualization extensions, virtualization techniques that are enabled by performance prohibitive and resource consuming software were adopted for mobile devices. Moreover, mobile virtualization solutions lack standard procedures for device component sharing and interfacing between multiple OSSs. The objective of this article is to survey software- and hardware-based mobile virtualization techniques in light of the recent advancements fueled by the hardware support for mobile virtualization. Challenges and issues faced in virtualization of CPU, memory, I/O, interrupt, and network interfaces are highlighted. Moreover, various performance parameters are presented in a detailed comparative analysis to quantify the efficiency of mobile virtualization techniques and solutions.

A Survey of Mobile Device Virtualization: Taxonomy and State of the Art

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces library operating systems (LibOSes) to SGX so that legacy applications can run inside enclaves with few or even no modifications. As virtually any non-trivial application demands multiple processes, it is essential for LibOSes to support multitasking. However, none of the existing SGX LibOSes support multitasking both securely and efficiently. 
This paper presents Occlum, a system that enables secure and efficient multitasking on SGX. We implement the LibOS processes as SFI-Isolated Processes (SIPs). SFI is a software instrumentation technique for sandboxing untrusted modules (called domains). We design a novel SFI scheme named MPX-based, Multi-Domain SFI (MMDSFI) and leverage MMDSFI to enforce the isolation of SIPs. We also design an independent verifier to ensure the security guarantees of MMDSFI. With SIPs safely sharing the single address space of an enclave, the LibOS can implement multitasking efficiently. The Occlum LibOS outperforms the state-of-the-art SGX LibOS on multitasking-heavy workloads by up to 6,600X on micro-benchmarks and up to 500X on application benchmarks.

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX.

Image scaling algorithms are intended to preserve the visual features before and after scaling, which is commonly used in numerous visual and image processing applications. In this paper, we demonstrate an automated attack against common scaling algorithms, i.e. to automatically generate camouflage images whose visual semantics change dramatically after scaling. To illustrate the threats from such camouflage attacks, we choose several computer vision applications as targeted victims, including multiple image classification applications based on popular deep learning frameworks, as well as mainstream web browsers. Our experimental results show that such attacks can cause different visual results after scaling and thus create evasion or data poisoning effect to these victim applications. We also present an algorithm that can successfully enable attacks against famous cloud-based image services (such as those from Microsoft Azure, Aliyun, Baidu, and Tencent) and cause obvious misclassification effects, even when the details of image processing (such as the exact scaling algorithm and scale dimension parameters) are hidden in the cloud. To defend against such attacks, this paper suggests a few potential countermeasures from attack prevention to detection.

/pdf/seeing-is-not-believing-camouflage-attacks-on-image-scaling-3kqxgx8f7m.pdf

Seeing is Not Believing: Camouflage Attacks on Image Scaling Algorithms

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces library operating systems (LibOSes) to SGX so that legacy applications can run inside enclaves with few or even no modifications. As virtually any non-trivial application demands multiple processes, it is essential for LibOSes to support multitasking. However, none of the existing SGX LibOSes support multitasking both securely and efficiently. This paper presents Occlum, a system that enables secure and efficient multitasking on SGX. We implement the LibOS processes as SFI-Isolated Processes (SIPs). SFI is a software instrumentation technique for sandboxing untrusted modules (called domains). We design a novel SFI scheme named MPX-based, Multi-Domain SFI (MMDSFI) and leverage MMDSFI to enforce the isolation of SIPs. We also design an independent verifier to ensure the security guarantees of MMDSFI. With SIPs safely sharing the single address space of an enclave, the LibOS can implement multitasking efficiently. The Occlum LibOS outperforms the state-of-the-art SGX LibOS on multitasking-heavy workloads by up to 6,600x on micro-benchmarks and up to 500x on application benchmarks.

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX

Live migration is one of the most important features of virtualization technology. With regard to recent virtualization techniques, performance of network I/O is critical. Current network I/O virtualization (e.g. Para-virtualized I/O, VMDq) has a significant performance gap with native network I/O. Pass-through network devices have near native performance, however, they have thus far prevented live migration. No existing methods solve the problem of live migration with pass-through devices perfectly.In this paper, we propose CompSC: a solution of hardware state migration that will enable the live migration support of pass-through devices. We go on to apply CompSC to SR-IOV network interface controllers. We discuss the attributes of different hardware states in pass-through devices and migrate them with corresponding techniques. Our experiments show that CompSC enables live migration on an Intel 82599 VF with a throughput 282.66% higher than para-virtualized devices. In addition, service downtime during live migration is 42.9% less than para-virtualized devices.

/pdf/compsc-live-migration-with-pass-through-devices-1xsluq1yzt.pdf

CompSC: live migration with pass-through devices

With the rapid growth of network bandwidth, increases in CPU cores on a single machine, and application API models demanding more short-lived connections, a scalable TCP stack is performance-critical. Although many clean-state designs have been proposed, production environments still call for a bottom-up parallel TCP stack design that is backward-compatible with existing applications. We present Fastsocket, a BSD Socket-compatible and scalable kernel socket design, which achieves table-level connection partition in TCP stack and guarantees connection locality for both passive and active connections. Fastsocket architecture is a ground up partition design, from NIC interrupts all the way up to applications, which naturally eliminates various lock contentions in the entire stack. Moreover, Fastsocket maintains the full functionality of the kernel TCP stack and BSD-socket-compatible API, and thus applications need no modifications. Our evaluations show that Fastsocket achieves a speedup of 20.4x on a 24-core machine under a workload of short-lived connections, outperforming the state-of-the-art Linux kernel TCP implementations. When scaling up to 24 CPU cores, Fastsocket increases the throughput of Nginx and HAProxy by 267% and 621% respectively compared with the base Linux kernel. We also demonstrate that Fastsocket can achieve scalability and preserve BSD socket API at the same time. Fastsocket is already deployed in the production environment of Sina WeiBo, serving 50 million daily active users and billions of requests per day.

Yu Chen

Papers

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX.

Seeing is Not Believing: Camouflage Attacks on Image Scaling Algorithms

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX

CompSC: live migration with pass-through devices

Scalable Kernel TCP Design and Implementation for Short-Lived Connections