A hypervisor-based system for protecting software runtime memory and persistent storage

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Using Programming Projects in an Operating Systems Course as a Capstone Software Engineering Experience Computer Engineering Technology students at the University of Dayton take two fundamental programming courses teaching the basics of algorithmic problem solving along with the VBA and C++ syntaxes. These courses develop a strong programming foundation for the students; however, they lack the ability to introduce software programming within larger software systems. The final course related to software development is a required operating systems course. This course contains three fundamental goals: to develop the students’ understanding of key operating system concepts, to increase the students’ software engineering capabilities, and to introduce the students to the internal workings of the Linux and Windows operating systems. The operating systems course relies heavily on software programming exercises as a key instrument in teaching students the framework and applications of modern operating systems. The unique aspect of this approach is that the programming projects are designed not as standalone activities, but instead as individual components of a larger software system. Therefore, each programming project focuses not just on learning new syntax related to operating system concepts, but also in how these concepts are relevant to the software system being developed. Students develop programs for both the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, working heavily with their associated application programming interfaces and investigating processes, threads, synchronization, input and output, and scheduling issues. A complete course overview and synopsis of the software programming projects will be presented along with student performance and comments from an end of the semester survey. Introduction The Computer Engineering Technology (CET) Program at the University of Dayton (UD) was started in 1999 and included two software programming courses. These courses predominately focused on teaching the fundamentals of software programming and the syntax associated with the VBA and C++ languages. Likewise, to satisfy the ABET outcome requirements for computer engineering technology programs, the ETC Program at UD also required a new 3 credit lecture course entitled “Concepts & Applications of Operating Systems” to be taken during the students’ Junior year of study.1 This course was structured to provide students hands-on exposure to the internal workings of modern operating systems. During the 2004/2005 academic year, the material being taught in the software programming was evaluated. In accordance with the Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) report by the Computer Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the two software programming courses being taught fell within the traditional imperative-first approach. This approach starts students off with software programming activities without any real preparations.2 After careful review, it was found that the student population being served needed to be taught the algorithmic thought process prior to the syntax as many of the students had no prior exposure to software programming and were struggling more with defining the problem solutions than with the specific syntax being taught.3 A modified algorithms-first approach from CC2001 report was applied to these courses. Instead

As one of most outstanding embedded real-time systems, QNX operating system is widely used on many key areas. Increasingly mature virtual machine technique is brought into QNX graphical interface program development to establish a "Host machine-Target machine" mode. On one computer, the developing platform for QNX graphical interface program is set up. Test results indicate that the developing platform obviously increases the efficiency of QNX interface program development and is suggested to other system programs development.

The combination of a real-time executive and an off-the-shelf time-sharing operating system has the potential of providing both predictability and the comfort of a large application base. To isolate the real-time section from a significant class of faults in the (ever-growing) time-sharing operating system, address spaces can be used to encapsulate the time-sharing subsystem. However, in practice, designers seldom use address spaces for this purpose, fearing that the extra cost induced limits the system's predictability. To analyze this cost, we compared in detail two systems with almost identical interfaces-both are a combination of the Linux operating system and a small real-time executive. Our analysis revealed that for interrupt-response times, the delay and jitter caused by address spaces are similar to or even smaller than those caused by caches and blocked interrupts. As a side effect of our analysis, we observed that published figures on predictability must be carefully checked whether or not such hardware features are included in the analysis. This paper is a follow-up of an earlier publication at the 3rd Real-Time Linux workshop. It is different in that we have further optimized our microkernel and examined more hardware.

As hard disk encryption, RAM disks, persistent data avoidance technology and memory resident malware become morewidespread, memory analysis becomes more important. In order to provide more virtual memory than is actually physicalpresent on a system, an operating system may transfer frames of memory to a pagefile on persistent storage. Current memoryanalysis software does not incorporate such pagefiles and thus misses important information. We therefore present a detailedanalysis of Windows NT paging. We use dynamic gray-box analysis, in which we place known data into virtual memory andexamine where it is mapped to, in either the physical memory or the pagefile, and cross-reference these findings with theWindows NT Research Kernel source code. We demonstrate how to decode the non-present page table entries, and accuratelyreconstruct the complete virtual memory space, including non-present memory pages on Windows NT systems using 32-bit,PAE or IA32e paging. Our analysis approach can be used to analyze other operating systems as well.

In current research operating systems, support for objects and the persistence of these objects has been recognised as an important consideration. Research systems provide support for these concepts in the kernel. In these systems a great deal of effort has gone into integrating persistence and object structures with the other low level functions of the operating system. The low level nature of the support ensures that these concepts are in every respect a seamless part of the operating system which interacts sensibly with other components of the system. There has been a tendency in such systems to ignore the issues of concurrency control and resilience, with the attitude that these concepts are well understood by the database community, and as such, can be easily added on top of the system at a later date. A research project is described which aims to investigate the implementation of concurrency control and resilience support at the lowest level of the operating system. Concurrency control and resilience are considered to be sufficiently important and complex issues that they merit support at a low layer of the operating system in the same sense that support for persistence belongs at this level. It is a motivating belief for this project that support for fully fledged concurrency control systems in a truly seamless fashion requires appropriate low level functionality provided by the system. The goal of this project is the identification a set of low level operating system primitives through which a variety of both traditional and more advanced concurrency control methods can be implemented on a persistent store. This goal is being approached through the development of a prototype persistent store which can be used as both an experimental environment and a testbed for the demonstration of the viability of the projects results.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Information Technology has evolved over a period of time from Electronic Data Processors (EDP) to Cloud based technologies. Software is a critical component in this industry. The core product component in software is the set of instructions in the form of source code. During inception of the industry, source code was accessible at no cost. In the next era of information technology (1970's &amp; 1980's), programs which were earlier available free of cost were sold at a price through licensing. During mid and early 1980's open source and hardware integrated software emerged. Similar trend was visible in system software market, especially in the operating system software market. Over a period of time Microsoft operating system emerged as one of the dominant players in the market. However, in the recent past Microsoft has considerably lost its market share in operating system products from 94.38% in June 2007 to 84% in May 2014. This paper captures the trend in operating system software market and analyses customers' preference to switch over from the current operating system. The trend in the market was analyzed through secondary data on market share and the customer preference to switch over was captured through a survey of engineers at various multinational IT firms in Bangalore. The study identified that the current trend could be moving towards open source or hardware integrated operating system from proprietary operating software. The survey identified that higher percentage of users preferred to switch over from the current operating system on desktops, laptops and workstations to either open source or hardware integrated operating system except servers.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, virtualization technology as a key technology in cloud computing is also constantly evolving. Virtualization technology has faced a major challenges in the contradiction between application-to-application independence and resource interoperability. As a kind of virtual technology based on operating system, the container perfectly solved the problem of program independence and resource sharing. This paper introduces the current two container technologies: Docker and Rkt. It firstly overviews the traditional virtual machine and container technology and finally tests the CUP and I/O performance of two containers through the special tools.

Abstract—During the Covid-19 pandemic, all learning activities were carried out online. Many learning media and software are used in online learning. One of them is the Open Source Operating System which is currently widely used in online learning systems. This makes the operating system much attention by the world of education, researchers, government organizations, individuals, even large software companies such as Google and others who are very interested in developing Open Source software, especially the Linux Operating System. This makes the authors interested in knowing how to develop an operating system based on open source software in online learning systems and disseminate the use of open source software to the public.

Performance analyses for embedded software construction with existing components require knowledge of performance characteristics of both application software and operating system (OS) services, especially those services that are critical for real-time applications. Since end users normally do not control the structure and implementation of OS services, but have to use them to meet the system-level performance constraints, it is essential and critical to characterize the performance of OS services with measurements. As such measurements are taken for performance analysis, not for comparison, the measurement methods should be different from those traditionally, used for comparison. In this paper we present an end-to-end method for measuring the performance of timing and scheduling services in selected real-time OSs for the performance modeling and analysis. The proposed method takes the factors of both OS implementations and application configurations into account to obtain the measured performance close to what applications will experience at runtime. The results have shown that the performance characteristics of OS services can be measured without instrumenting the kernel source code, and hence, can be reused for the analysis of a family of applications.

: The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) (N-NC) crew training has been hindered by an inability to conduct dynamic training and exercises on multiple Command and Control (C2) systems. There was no common simulation injector because of stove-piped acquisitions and legacy interfaces that were incompatible with the Live-Virtual-Constructive Toolkits. The N-NC Joint Training and Exercise Directorate could not afford traditional replication or emulation of all C2 systems and their data sources, nor the inevitable sustainment costs. This paper presents a cost-effective solution to provide dynamic scenario injection into multiple C2 systems: leveraging server and desktop virtualization technology described in previous I/ITSEC papers. The virtualization process transforms stand-alone systems into functionally equivalent virtual machines (VMs). Server virtualization technology lets multiple VMs run as guests on a single host, and a host can support VMs running different operating systems. This allows entire processing strings, distributed throughout North America, to be converted into VMs on a single server. Because the VMs inherit the fidelity of the actual processors, their outputs are as authentic as the operational systems. These VMs feed processed simulation event data into actual C2 systems or equivalent VMs. Future operational system upgrades can be virtualized and then replace existing VMs without changing this infrastructure. Desktop virtualization technology allows users to run multiple VMs in separate windows on a common display. NNC exploited desktop virtualization to simplify the trainee and model operator's workspaces. They can view and manage multiple VMs with one monitor, keyboard and mouse (controlling simulations, lower echelon processing and operator interaction, and viewing C2 workstation displays).

Operating systems are the key foundational components of the software stacks employed in many safety-critical scenarios. A tiny error or loophole in the operating system may cause major failures of the overall software system, resulting in huge economic losses or endangering human lives. Thus, the correctness of the operating system should be verified to reduce the number of such accidents. Traditional testing methods cannot guarantee the exhaustive detection of potential errors in the target system. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt formal methods based on strict mathematical theories for verifying operating systems. In an operating system, mutexes are utilized to coordinate the access to shared resources by tasks and they are a typical means of task synchronization. The functional correctness of mutexes is the key to the correct functioning of multi-task applications. Based on the theorem proof method, we conduct formal verification on the code of the mutex module of a preemptive microkernel in the interactive theorem prover Coq, give the formal specifications of the interface functions of this module, and formally prove the functional correctness of these interface functions.

The Windows is most popular operating system in the market. But it is not more secure than Linux, it is not high reliable, it does not provides hardware flexibility and better choices, it does not reliable. But it is more user friendly operating system due to its attractive GUI. Different software programs are designed for different operating systems, and most will not work on systems that they were designed. So many of the companies are migrated from Windows to Linux. So this paper examines the survey of Windows to Linux migration with wine. Wine is reimplementation of Windows API. It also has a unique architecture. It implements as a compatibility layer over a Unix-like kernel which allows Unix-like operating system to run 32 bit application of Windows with wine and its libraries. Organizations consider migrating to Linux to reduce costs and increase and improve stability, security, uptime, and availability.

Operating System is an important software in computer system. For personal and office use the operating system is sufficient. However, to critical mission applications such as nuclear power plants and braking system on the car (auto braking system) which need a high level of reliability, it requires operating system which operates in real time. The study aims to assess the implementation of the Linux-based operating system on a Single Board Computer (SBC) ARM-based, namely Pandaboard ES with the Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9, TI OMAP 4460 type. Research was conducted by the method of implementation of the General Purpose OS Ubuntu 12:04 OMAP4-armhf-RTOS and Linux 3.4.0-rt17 + on PandaBoard ES. Then research compared the latency value of each OS on no-load and with full-load condition. The results obtained show the maximum latency value of RTOS on full load condition is at 45 uS, much smaller than the maximum value of GPOS at full-load at 17.712 uS. The lower value of latency demontrates that the RTOS has ability to run the process in a certain period of time much better than the GPOS.

The NHS Healthy New Towns programme was developed as an initiative to improve health in communities. In this article, Holly Norman and Daniel McDonnell from the programme describe how this initiative is helping to shape health through the built environment.[Image omitted: See PDF.]In 2014, the Five Year Forward View fired a starting gun in the race to transform health and health care in England.[1] The future vision set out in this document signalled change in many ways: delivering a 'radical upgrade in prevention', moving to new health care 'operating systems' drawing on game-changing technologies and expanding the horizons of the national health system to take in new themes and perspectives.[1]One of the current National Health Service (NHS) programmes that embodies these changes most comprehensively is the Healthy New Towns programme, which partners housing developments with the NHS in order to build better environments for health.[2]As the nation grapples with a national housing shortage, the rapid development of new places and communities forces the question of how health and the wider public sector pull together to turn the ambitions of the Forward View into reality.[3] There is a double imperative here. First, we must ensure that we take steps to protect the health of populations by seizing the chance to embed positive planning and design decisions that will shape places for generations. Second, new developments offer the opportunity to fast-track ideas and inspire existing communities to deliver the radical changes the NHS needs.The potential of new developments to fulfil this second ambition was initially conceived in terms of opportunities to accelerate development of integrated care models and 'design modern services from scratch'.[4] This means thinking hard - and fast - about the implications of the emerging 'Vanguard' care models for healthcare estates and technological infrastructure, demonstrating to the rest of nation what the future might look like as these new models roll out across the country.[5]Ambitions for the programme have evolved rapidly, with equal emphasis now placed on 'shaping new towns, neighbourhoods and strong communities that promote health and wellbeing, prevent illness and keep people independent'.[4] Ideas that bridge public health and planning communities find a home here, such as using planning and design that brings together disciplines and partners to create inclusive public spaces that draw communities together and reduce social isolation or laying out infrastructure to make walking and cycling more appealing options than getting in a car. Combining such approaches with state-of-the-art behavioural insights will help deliver new places in which the easiest choice is also the healthiest choice.Linking the urgent need to build more new homes to building better, healthier homes, the Healthy New Towns programme has hit a vein of interest and support across the country as well as throughout Whitehall. The 10 sites with which the NHS will partner through the programme were announced to press fanfare in March 2016, having been chosen from more than 100 applicants after a selection process lasting five months.[6]-[8] Sites were put forward from every region, ranging from developments of a few hundred households to entirely new towns and suburbs where tens of thousands of people will eventually live. Sites' proposals differed to reflect local circumstances, but all applications shared an enthusiasm to take a holistic place-based approach to public health and healthcare services. They also had in common an appetite to exploit the opportunities for innovation afforded by focussing on new developments less constrained than other places by existing infrastructure such as general practioners' (GP) surgeries, schools and other public buildings that lock-in established behaviours and traditional service models. …

Memory management is one of the main tasks of an Operating System, where the data of each process running in the system is kept. In this context, there exist several types of attacks that exploit memory-related vulnerabilities, forcing Operating Systems to feature memory protection techniques that make difficult to exploit them. One of these techniques is ASLR, whose function is to introduce randomness into the virtual address space of a process. The goal of this work was to measure, analyze and compare the behavior of ASLR on the 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The results have shown that the implementation of ASLR has improved significantly on these two Operating Systems compared to previous versions. However, there are aspects, such as partial correlations or a frequency distribution that is not always uniform, so it can still be improved.