Transforming policies into mechanisms with infokernel

Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H.; Burnett, Nathan C.; Denehy, Timothy E.; Engle, Thomas J.; Gunawi, Haryadi S.; Nugent, James A.; Popovici, Florentina I.

doi:10.1145/945453.945455

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Barrelfish uses this functionality for, among other things, representing the memory hierarchy to performance-conscious parallel applications, and as a name server for other system services. Along with the authors of Infokernel [3], we argue for making a rich representation of system information available for online reasoning, and CLP provides a powerful tool for achieving this.…”

Section: Advantagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Declarative language techniques have also been applied to operating systems, to date largely in the area of resource allocation. The Infokernel [3] was an early advocate in the OS arena of making a rich representation of system information available for online reasoning. Singularity [27] uses XML manifests to reason about the resources used by a device driver.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Declarative Language Approach to Device Configuration

Schüpbach

Baumann

Roscoe

et al. 2012

ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

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C remains the language of choice for hardware programming (device drivers, bus configuration, etc.): it is fast, allows low-level access, and is trusted by OS developers. However, the algorithms required to configure and reconfigure hardware devices and interconnects are becoming more complex and diverse, with the added burden of legacy support, "quirks", and hardware bugs to work around. Even programming PCI bridges in a modern PC is a surprisingly complex problem, and is getting worse as new functionality such as hotplug appears. Existing approaches use relatively simple algorithms, hard-coded in C and closely coupled with low-level register access code, generally leading to suboptimal configurations.We investigate the merits and drawbacks of a new approach: separating hardware configuration logic (algorithms to determine configuration parameter values) from mechanism (programming device registers). The latter we keep in C, and the former we encode in a declarative programming language with constraint-satisfaction extensions. As a test case, we have implemented full PCI configuration, resource allocation, and interrupt assignment in the Barrelfish research operating system, using a concise expression of efficient algorithms in constraint logic programming. We show that the approach is tractable, and can successfully configure a wide range of PCs with competitive runtime cost. Moreover, it requires about half the code of the C-based approach in Linux while offering considerably more functionality. Additionally it easily accommodates adaptations such as hotplug, fixed regions, and "quirks".

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Section: Advantagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Declarative Language Approach to Device Configuration

Schüpbach

Baumann

Roscoe

et al. 2012

ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

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show abstract

“…A classic principle in OS kernel design is to separate mechanisms and policies [19]. Specifically, kernel developers build a small yet expressive set of mechanisms, on top of which users can implement flexible policies optimal for their workloads without the need to re-implement the mechanisms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

EOS: Automatic In-vivo Evolution of Kernel Policies for Better Performance

Cui,

Chen,

Yang

2015

Preprint

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Today's monolithic kernels often implement a small, fixed set of policies such as disk I/O scheduling policies, while exposing many parameters to let users select a policy or adjust the specific setting of the policy. Ideally, the parameters exposed should be flexible enough for users to tune for good performance, but in practice, users lack domain knowledge of the parameters and are often stuck with bad, default parameter settings.We present EOS, a system that bridges the knowledge gap between kernel developers and users by automatically evolving the policies and parameters in vivo on users' real, production workloads. It provides a simple policy specification API for kernel developers to programmatically describe how the policies and parameters should be tuned, a policy cache to make in-vivo tuning easy and fast by memozing good parameter settings for past workloads, and a hierarchical search engine to effectively search the parameter space. Evaluation of EOS on four main Linux subsystems shows that it is easy to use and effectively improves each subsystem's performance.

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Transforming policies into mechanisms with infokernel

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

A Declarative Language Approach to Device Configuration

A Declarative Language Approach to Device Configuration

EOS: Automatic In-vivo Evolution of Kernel Policies for Better Performance

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