International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper illustrates a device driver implementation used to support a PC compatible telemetry device. Device requirements included operation on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows NT 5.0 and Windows 98 platforms. A single device driver was not possible due to the differences between driver requirements on the various operating systems. The Windows Driver Model (WDM) was considered for NT 5.0 and Win98, however, NT 4.0 and Win95 does not support the WDM. To minimize software development and support efforts, it was clear that an architecture compatible to both WDM, NT 4.0 and Windows 95 needed to be developed. The resulting layered device driver architecture provides a common upper interface and uses a register based model to describe the hardware at the lower interface. The common upper interface is compatible with all of the target operating systems and presents a consistent Applications Programming Interface (API) for the telemetry application developer. The lower interface is specific for each platform but contains minimal device specific functionality. A simple register I/O driver is easily implemented using all of the target operating systems. The layered architecture and register based interface to the hardware results in a multiple operating system code set which differs only at the lowest layer.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / November 04-07, 1991 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In this paper we present the REAL/STONE Real-Time Tester, a tool for performance evaluation of real-time UNIX operating systems. The REAL/STONE Real-Time Tester is a synthetic benchmark that simulates a typical real-time environment. The tool performs typical real-time operations, such as: (a) reads data from an external source and accesses it periodically, (b) processes data through a number of real-time processes, and © displays the final data. This study can help users in selecting the most-effective real-time UNIX operating system for a given application.

This dissertation describes the design and implementation of the file system component of the Saguaro operating system for computers connected by a local-area network. Systems constructed on such an architecture have the potential advantage of increased file availability due to their inherent redundancy. In Saguaro, this advantage is made available through two mechanisms that support semi-automatic file replication and access: reproduction sets and metafiles. A reproduction set is a collection of files that the system attempts to keep identical on a "best effort" basis, relying on the user to handle unusual situations that may arise. A metafile is a special file that contains symbolic path names of other files; when a metafile is opened, the system selects an available constituent file and opens it instead. These mechanisms are especially appropriate for situations that do not require guaranteed consistency or a large number of copies. Other interesting aspects of the Saguaro file system design are also described. The logical file system forms a single tree, yet any file can be placed in any of the physical file systems. This organization allows the creation of a logical association among files that is quite different from their physical association. In addition, the broken path algorithm is described. This algorithm makes it possible to bypass elements in a path name that are on inaccessible physical file systems. Thus, any accessible file can be made available, regardless of the availability of directories in its path. Details are provided on the implementation of the Saguaro file system. The servers of which the system is composed are described individually and a comprehensive operational example is supplied to illustrate their interation. The underlying data structures of the file system are presented. The virtual roots, which contain information used by the broken path algorithm, are the most novel of these. Finally, an implementation of reproduction sets and metafiles for interconnected networks running Berkeley UNIX is described. This implementation demonstrates the broad applicability of these mechanisms. It also provides insight into the way in which mechanisms to facilitate user controlled replication of files can be inexpensively added to existing file systems. Performance measurements for this implementation are also presented.

As the complexity of embedded systems grows, there is an increasing use of operating systems (OSes) in embedded devices, such as mobile phones, media players and other consumer electronics. Despite their convenience and flexibility, such operating systems can be overly general and contain features and code that are not needed in every application context, which incurs unnecessary performance overheads. In most embedded systems, resources, such as processing power, available memory, and power consumption, are strictly constrained. In particular, the amount of memory on embedded devices is often very limited. This, together with the popular usage of operating systems in embedded devices, makes it important to reduce the memory footprint of operating systems. This dissertation addresses this challenge and presents automated ways to reduce the memory footprint of OS kernels for embedded systems. First, we present kernel code compaction, an automated approach that reduces the code size of an OS kernel statically by removing unused functionality. OS kernel code tends to be different from ordinary application code, including the presence of a significant amount of hand-written assembly code, multiple entry points, implicit control flow paths involving interrupt handlers, and frequent indirect control flow via function pointers. We use a novel "approximated compilation" technique to apply source-level pointer analysis to hand-written assembly code. A prototype implementation of our idea on an Intel x86 platform and a minimally configured Linux kernel obtains a code size reduction of close to 24%.Even though code compaction can remove a portion of the entire OS kernel code, when exercised with typical embedded benchmarks, such as MiBench, most kernel code is executed infrequently if at all. Our second contribution is on-demand code loading, an automated approach that keeps the rarely used code on secondary storage and loads it into main memory only when it is needed. In order to minimize the overhead of code loading, a greedy node-coalescing algorithm is proposed to group closely related code together. The experimental results show that this approach can reduce memory requirements for the Linux kernel code by about 53%with little degradation in performance. Last, we describe dynamic data structure compression, an approach that reduces the runtime memory footprint of dynamic data structures in an OS kernel. A prototype implementation for the Linux kernel reduces the memory consumption of the slab allocators in Linux by 17.5%when running the MediaBench suite while incurring only minimal increases in execution time (1.9%).

The goal of this master thesis is to extend HelenOS operating system with the support for ccNUMA hardware. The text of the thesis contains a brief introduction to ccNUMA hardware, an overview of NUMA features and relevant features of HelenOS (memory management, scheduling, etc.). The thesis analyses various design decisions of the implementation of NUMA support -- introducing the hardware topology into the kernel data structures, propagating this information to user space, thread affinity to cores and nodes, memory allocation policies, load balancing, etc. The thesis also contains a prototype implementation of ccNUMA support in HelenOS for the AMD64 platform and a brief evaluation and comparison with ccNUMA support in other monolithic and microkernel-based operating systems.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Operating systems software is fundamental to modern computer systems: all other applications are dependent upon the correct and timely provision of basic system services. At the same time, advances in programming languages and type theory have lead to the creation of functional programming languages with type systems that are designed to combine theorem proving with practical systems programming. The Terrier operating system project focuses on low-level systems programming in the context of a multi-core, real-time, embedded system, while taking advantage of a dependently typed programming language named ATS to improve reliability. Terrier is a new point in the design space for an operating system, one that leans heavily on an associated programming language, ATS, to provide safety that has traditionally been in the scope of hardware protection and kernel privilege. Terrier tries to have far fewer abstractions between program and hardware. The purpose of Terrier is to put programs as much in contact with the real hardware, real memory, and real timing constraints as possible, while still retaining the ability to multiplex programs and provide for a reasonable level of safety through static analysis.

Computer systems have become increasingly diverse and specialized in recent years. This complexity supports a wide range of new computing uses and users, but is not without cost: it has become difficult to maintain the efficiency of contemporary general purpose computing systems. Computing inefficiencies, which include nonoptimal runtimes, excessive energy use, and limits to scalability, are a serious problem that can result in an inability to apply computing to solve the world's most important problems. Beyond the complexity and vast diversity of modern computing platforms and applications, a number of factors make improving general purpose efficiency challenging, including the requirement that multiple levels of the computer system stack be examined, that legacy hardware devices and software may stand in the way of achieving efficiency, and the need to balance efficiency with reusability, programmability, security, and other goals. This dissertation presents five case studies, each demonstrating different ways in which the measurement of emerging systems can provide actionable advice to help keep general purpose computing efficient. The first of the five case studies is Parallel Block Vectors, a new profiling method for understanding parallel programs with a fine-grained, code-centric perspective aids in both future hardware design and in optimizing software to map better to existing hardware. Second is a project that defines a new way of measuring application interference on a datacenter's worth of chip-multiprocessors, leading to improved scheduling where applications can more effectively utilize available hardware resources. Next is a project that uses the GT-Pin tool to define a method for accelerating the simulation of GPGPUs, ultimately allowing for the development of future hardware with fewer inefficiencies. The fourth project is an experimental energy survey that compares and combines the latest energy efficiency solutions at different levels of the stack to properly evaluate the state of the art and to find paths forward for future energy efficiency research. The final project presented is NRG-Loops, a language extension that allows programs to measure and intelligently adapt their own power and energy use.

by Hsieh Shing Leung Arthur. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81). / List of Figures --- p.viii / List of Tables --- p.ix / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background and Related Work --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Load Distribution --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Load Index --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Task Transfer Mechanism --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Load Distribution Facility --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Load Distribution Algorithm --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Classification --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Components --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Stability and Effectiveness --- p.9 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Mach Operating System --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Mach kernel abstractions --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Mach kernel features --- p.11 / Chapter 2.4 --- Related Work --- p.12 / Chapter 3 --- The Design of Distributed Scheduling Framework --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1 --- System Model --- p.16 / Chapter 3.2 --- Design Objectives and Decisions --- p.17 / Chapter 3.3 --- An Overview of DSF Architecture --- p.17 / Chapter 3.4 --- The DSF server --- p.18 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Load Information Module --- p.19 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Movement Module --- p.22 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Decision Module --- p.25 / Chapter 3.5 --- LD library --- p.28 / Chapter 3.6 --- User-Agent --- p.29 / Chapter 4 --- The System Implementation --- p.33 / Chapter 4.1 --- Shared data structure --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2 --- Synchronization --- p.37 / Chapter 4.3 --- Reentrant library --- p.39 / Chapter 4.4 --- Interprocess communication (IPC) --- p.42 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Mach IPC --- p.42 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Socket IPC --- p.43 / Chapter 5 --- Experimental Studies --- p.47 / Chapter 5.1 --- Load Distribution algorithms --- p.47 / Chapter 5.2 --- Experimental environment --- p.49 / Chapter 5.3 --- Experimental results --- p.50 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Performance of LD algorithms --- p.50 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Degree of task transfer --- p.54 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Effect of threshold value --- p.55 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.57 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary and Conclusion --- p.57 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.58 / Chapter A --- LD Library --- p.60 / Chapter B --- Sample Implementation of LD algorithms --- p.65 / Chapter B.l --- LOWEST --- p.65 / Chapter B.2 --- THRHLD --- p.67 / Chapter C --- Installation Guide --- p.71 / Chapter C.1 --- Software Requirement --- p.71 / Chapter C.2 --- Installation Steps --- p.72 / Chapter C.3 --- Configuration --- p.73 / Chapter D --- User's Guide --- p.74 / Chapter D.1 --- The DSF server --- p.74 / Chapter D.2 --- The User Agent --- p.74 / Chapter D.3 --- LD experiment --- p.77 / Bibliography --- p.78