Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern Hardware

This paper discuss on how to develop a hard real-time machine control system with Microsoft Windows NT Operating System, where the respond must be within 0.5 milliseconds. The attempt to use a general-purpose operating system (Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation) is because there is abundance of Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Components (COTS), easily available tools (compilers, and 3 party tools) and need not to learn another operating system behavior. The most important factor is there is no single dominant operating system or tools vendor for real-time operating system. Since the no single dominant real-time operating system development under real-time operating system is riskier and more costly. Ideally codes must be portable between different operating system where it is apparent with Windows platforms, Windows 95/98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP or even Windows CE. Firstly study was done on how Microsoft Windows NT operating system works internally from materials from Microsoft Software Development Network (MSDN). Secondly study was done how to take advantage of the operating system to create a real time application. Microsoft Windows NT is a general purpose operating system that does not support real time application development, but it has all the vital elements that a real time operating system needs. The vital elements are priority-driven, preemptive scheduler, preemptive interrupt handler (for critical interrupts), deferred procedure calls (DPC) for non-critical (DPC executes after ISR), synchronization and deterministic response time. With these vital elements and some modification to application codes to enable it to execute in higher priority level, would result a real time application. This does not mean changing all the codes to higher priority is the solution, as it would cause system to malfunction as other device driver or low-level interface run at high priority too and this would lock up the system. With the combination of priority level, synchronization a complete real time solution can be implemented and this paper covers the concept. This concept also explains what was done to overcome the need of special hardware (as recommended) to accomplish hard real-time application with the response of 0.5 milliseconds.

Object-oriented models are a popular basis for supporting uniform sharing of data and services in operating systems, distributed programming systems, and database systems. We term systems that use objects for these purposes object sharing systems. Operating systems in common use have nonuniform addressing models, making the uniform object naming required by object sharing systems expensive and difficult to implement. We argue that emerging 64-bit architectures make it practical to support uniform naming at the virtual addressing level, eliminating a key implementation problem for object sharing systems. We describe facilities for object-based sharing of persistent data and services in Opal, an operating system we are developing for paged 64-bit architectures. The distinctive feature of Opal is that object sharing is supported in a runtime library, a,bove a single virtual address space that maps all primary and secondary storage in a local area network. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. CCR-8619663 and CCR8907666; by the Washington Technology Center; and by Digital Equipment Corporation through the Systems Research Center, DECwest Engineering, the External Research Program, and the Graduate Engineering Education Program. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notico is Siven that copving is bv permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise. or to republish, requires B fee and/or specific permission. o 1992 ACM 0-89791.539.9/92/0010/0397...$1.50

The core idea in this project is to have two operating systems for both cores of dual core processor individually. General purpose operating system on one core and Real time operating system (RTOS) on second core. Implementation of same will be done by making one of core independent from General purpose operating system and install RTOS in that core so that both will work as one system i.e. General purpose operating system will look after the non-real time applications and RTOS will ensure that all real time application should not miss their deadline and executed as fast as they can. As by installing general purpose operating system and RTOS in both the cores of dual core processors of system and running them in parallel way, dual core processors is being used to its maximum efficiency. The advantage is that if one of OS gets crashed, whole system will not crash instead one of OS which didn't crash hold the system to safe mode till damaged OS is recovered.

This paper investigates the possibilities of using virtualization in multicore real-time embedded systems based on combination of general-purpose and real-time operating systems running on separate processor cores. The research is focused on ARM processor architecture due to its widespread usage in numerous application domains. The paper describes the concepts and practical considerations of using virtualization to achieve better interrupt latency both in Linux, as a typical representative of commonly used general-purpose operating system in applications requiring real-time response, and real-time operating system running on separate cores. In the proposed approach we demonstrate how to use virtualization mechanism to decouple cores responsible for real-time and non real-time tasks in a multiprocessor system with real-time requirements. Xen Hypervisor is used as a virtual machine monitor with default credit and new experimental null scheduler. The aim of research was to study the system response time characteristics and to assess practical usability of such approach in applications with hard real-time requirements.

No abstract available.

Presents a paradigm that combines the speed of single address spaces with the traditional protection mechanisms found in multiple address space systems such as UNIX. Multiple address spaces are common today for providing safety and security in operating systems. A process in one address space cannot corrupt or compromise memory locations an another process's address space. However, inter-process communication is slow because it is expensive to context switch between address spaces. Single address space systems provide a solution to the problem of slow context switches. In a single address space system, which is typically implemented in a 64-bit address space, all processes shape a common address space. Hence, the need to move between address spaces during inter-process communication is avoided. It is our position that it is not strictly necessary to use a single address space in order to achieve fast inter-process communication. >

6 - Operating Systems

In the movie Matrix, our hero Neo must choose between taking the Blue Pill and continuing to live in an online, synthesized fantasy world, or taking the Red Pill and joining the real world. The fantasy world appears to those living in it to be full of flowers and trees and big steak dinners, but unknown to them contains malicious Agents who can alter any portion of the world to suit their needs. The real world, in turn, while real, has no visible sun, and the people have only gray mush for food.Authorization and authentication of online transactions across a network requires a trusted path between the user and the server. We posit that those who attempt to solve this problem by creating the trusted path on the general-purpose operating system have taken the Blue Pill and are living in a fantasy world. One simply cannot properly secure a general-purpose operating system.Solving the problem by taking the Red Pill and completely replacing currently used operating systems with ones that we can properly secure does not seem palatable. We suggest a solution that involves taking both the Blue Pill and the Red Pill: providing the trusted path by means of a separate device with a secure operating system, used in tandem with the existing general purpose operating system. Most user interaction occurs on the un-trusted system, with the secure device only being used to finalise transactions.We believe that the technology required for such a device is readily available. Obviously our idea is not a completely novel idea; prior work in the area has had a similar goal. However, most of those attempts have not properly addressed the requirements for the trusted system, generally preferring to use existing general-purpose systems even when on a dedicated [Balfanz 1999] [Kingpin 2001] Others have a very limited scope of use. [Blakely 2004].We identify a minimum set of requirements for the trusted device. This paper does not provide a working solution (it is a position paper after all); we simply define how one should approach that working solution. Because we advocate a hybrid system it is possible to simplify the trusted system to a point where it would not be usable as a general purpose system, which should make the trusted system rather easier to build and have confidence in.

Constructing an embedded device with a real-time and a general-purpose operating system has attracted attention as a promising approach to let the device balance real-time responsiveness and rich functionalities. This paper introduces our methodology for constructing such multi-OS platform with minimal engineering cost by assuming asymmetric OS combinations unique to embedded systems. Our methodology consists of two parts. One is a simple hypervisor for multiplexing resources to be shared between operating systems. The other is modifying operating systems to allow them to be aware of each other. We constructed an experimental system executing TOPPERS and Linux simultaneously on a hardware equipped with an SH-4A processor. The modification to each operating system kernel limited to a few dozen lines of code and do not introduce any overhead that would compromise real-time responsiveness or system throughput.KeywordsEmbed SystemEngineering CostEmbed DeviceVirtual Machine MonitorVirtual ProcessorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The IGEM (Industrial Global Environment Manager), which is a real-time operating system with ITRON specifications, has been developed and applied to the mobile radio communication systems. This system is used for AVM (Automatic Vehicle Monitoring) and MCA systems (Multi Channel Access) which uses M68000 (MCP-16 board) CPUs, having several connections to more than one microcomputer. In this system, a general purpose operating system (OS-9)* and real-time operating system (IGEM) coexist,and they work together. This paper introduces examples of the use of this system and gives an evaluation of its operating system.

In recent years, the number of invested resources adopted in experiments of embedded applications dropped significantly as many simulation technologies are widely used. However, the efficiency of simulations is seriously influenced by some expensive and difficult-to-obtain devices. It is urgent and of great significance to build a universal simulation platform for embedded applications on general-purpose operating systems with an objective of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of system development and implementation. Since virtualization technology can greatly enhance the simulation efficiency by providing virtual models to simulate the behaviors of real devices, this paper designs and realizes a real-time simulation platform on general-purpose operating systems with the virtualization technology such that embedded applications would be correctly and efficiently debugged and tested on the general-purpose operating systems. The proposed simulation platform contains four layers named hardware resource, virtualization, virtual runtime environment, and interface adaptation, allowing dynamic debugging and testing of embedded applications without requiring the actual presence of real devices. Experiments are conducted to verify the functionalities of the proposed simulation platform, and results demonstrate that the proposed simulation platform can meet the real-time and high reliability requirements of embedded applications.

The picky needs raised in the embedded market lead to the growth of real-time operating systems (RTOS), which differ from the general-purpose operating systems (GPOS) by applying strict timing and providing predictable execution of tasks. Some features of a real-time application, such as human interaction and some data transfers to other components are not time-critical. As the general-purpose operating system requires access to the data gathered by the real-time operating system, these two should be consolidated on the same platform form a hybrid system. This proposal examines how the existing Sloth approach of interrupt-driven scheduling can apply to a hybrid system running both a real-time and the Linux kernel simultaneously on the unchanged hardware. This entails a make another study of existing approaches towards a real-time capable Linux and the design of a communication channel between the real-time core and processes running in Linux kernel. The evaluation of the resulting Slothful Linux is supposed to show the advantages of the Sloth approach in a hybrid system compared to both the standalone Sloth and another real-time conservatory for Linux.

We investigate operating system noise, which we identify as one of the main reasons for a lack of synchronicity in parallel applications. Using a microbenchmark, we measure the noise on several contemporary platforms and find that, even with a general-purpose operating system, noise can be limited if certain precautions are taken. We then inject artificially generated noise into a massively parallel system and measure its influence on the performance of collective operations. Our experiments indicate that on extreme-scale platforms, the performance is correlated with the largest interruption to the application, even if the probability of such an interruption is extremely small. We demonstrate that synchronizing the noise can significantly reduce its negative influence

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has recently gained popularity due to its ability of offering high scalability and programmability using commodity servers and general-purpose operating system (OS). However, current OSes have failed to deliver the data-plane performance required by the software-based network functions, mainly due to the inherent overheads associated with network stack in the kernel. We present mKPAC, aimed at improving data plane performance of OS kernel in manycore environment. We analyze the high-impact overheads residing in network stack of Linux kernel, and show that the data plane performance for NFV can be accelerated by mitigating major performance penalties and by leveraging the availability of manycores. With 64 bytes packet size, mKPAC can successfully accelerate the Linux Kernel packet forwarding performance up to 40% in packets per second.

Real-time capabilities are required for a controller of a large format array to reduce a dead-time attributed by readout and data transfer. The real-time processing has been achieved by dedicated processors including DSP, CPLD, and FPGA devices. However, the dedicated processors have problems with memory resources, inflexibility, and high cost. Meanwhile, a recent PC has sufficient resources of CPUs and memories to control the infrared array and to process a large amount of frame data in real-time. In this study, we have developed an infrared array controller with a software real-time operating system (RTOS) instead of the dedicated processors. A Linux PC equipped with a RTAI extension and a dual-core CPU is used as a main computer, and one of the CPU cores is allocated to the real-time processing. A digital I/O board with DMA functions is used for an I/O interface. The signal-processing cores are integrated in the OS kernel as a real-time driver module, which is composed of two virtual devices of the clock processor and the frame processor tasks. The array controller with the RTOS realizes complicated operations easily, flexibly, and at a low cost.