The Inferno™ operating system

Dorward, Sean; Pike, Rob; Presotto, David L.; Ritchie, Dennis M.; Trickey, Howard; Winterbottom, Philip

doi:10.1002/bltj.2028

Cited by 39 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Singularity differs from other single address operating system, such as Pilot, Cedar, Smalltalk, Lisp Machines, Oberon, or Inferno [12,20,35,39,44], which encouraged sharing objects between processes and did not segregate a process's objects. These systems presented a programming model similar to threads in a process, rather than SIPs' process-like, segmented object spaces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Deconstructing process isolation

Aiken

Fähndrich

Hawblitzel

et al. 2006

Proceedings of the 2006 Workshop on Memory System Performance and Correctness

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Most operating systems enforce process isolation through hardware protection mechanisms such as memory segmentation, page mapping, and differentiated user and kernel instructions. Singularity is a new operating system that uses software mechanisms to enforce process isolation. A software isolated process (SIP) is a process whose boundaries are established by language safety rules and enforced by static type checking. SIPs provide a low cost isolation mechanism that provides failure isolation and fast inter-process communication.To compare the performance of Singularity's SIPs against traditional isolation techniques, we implemented an optional hardware isolation mechanism. Protection domains are hardware-enforced address spaces, which can contain one or more SIPs. Domains can either run at the kernel's privilege level or be fully isolated from the kernel and run at the normal application privilege level. With protection domains, we can construct Singularity configurations that are similar to micro-kernel and monolithic kernel systems. We found that hardware-based isolation incurs non-trivial performance costs (up to 25-33%) and complicates system implementation. Software isolation has less than 5% overhead on these benchmarks.The lower run-time cost of SIPs makes their use feasible at a finer granularity than conventional processes. However, hardware isolation remains valuable as a defense-in-depth against potential failures in software isolation mechanisms. Singularity's ability to employ hardware isolation selectively enables careful balancing of the costs and benefits of each isolation technique.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Deconstructing process isolation

Aiken

Fähndrich

Hawblitzel

et al. 2006

Proceedings of the 2006 Workshop on Memory System Performance and Correctness

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“…Tubes are optimistic channels. Although there are many different implementations of communication channels for CSP‐like programming (see, for example, ), it is interesting to describe the implementation of tubes as a use case for the new semaphores. Using the semaphores described earlier, the implementation of tubes is extremely easy and straightforward.…”

Section: Optimistic Tubesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimistic semaphores with non‐deterministic choice operation for heterogeneous manycore systems

Soriano-Salvador

Muzquiz

Ballesteros

2014

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary The Nix operating system permits different roles to be assigned to the cores. One of the roles is to be able to run user‐space code with no interrupts from the operating system, which is particularly useful for high‐performance computing. System calls are especially expensive to a core playing this role. This paper presents a new implementation of optimistic semaphores that avoid performing expensive system calls in an uncontended scenario. The implementation is straightforward and somewhat unorthodox: a semaphore is based on a data structure and a lock that are shared between user space and kernel space. This study aims at evaluating if such an approach is viable. In addition, the implementation includes a non‐deterministic choice operation over a collection of semaphores, altsems. This novel operation facilitates the creation of higher‐level communication mechanisms, such as sockets and channels. To support this claim, we implemented a new kind of buffered communication channels named tubes, tailored for communicating processes running on different (heterogeneous) cores. The paper describes the implementation of the semaphores and the tubes, a comparative analysis of optimistic and non‐optimistic semaphores on Nix, and a comparative analysis of tubes and other kinds of communication channels that are available on the Nix operating system. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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“…The core of Brasil is a self-contained daemon which is based on a fork of Inferno [4]. Inferno is an open source distributed operating system which is a direct descendant of the Plan 9 operating system [11].…”

Section: Brasilmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brasil

Hensbergen¹,

Shinde

Evans

2011

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers

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Brasil is a self-contained service which can be deployed across a cluster to provide a dataflow workload distribution and communication aggregation mechanism. Together with our dataflow shell, named PUSH, it is intended to be used for the management of non-traditional super computing applications as well as provide a mechanism to manage in-situ analysis and vizualization of more traditional high performance computing simulations. This paper describes our experiences implementing and deploying a prototype of Brasil on a BlueGene/P supercomputer.

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The Inferno™ operating system

Cited by 39 publications

References 3 publications

Deconstructing process isolation

Deconstructing process isolation

Optimistic semaphores with non‐deterministic choice operation for heterogeneous manycore systems

Brasil

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