Hardware-based Dual Booting Switch with Customizable Setup Script and Cross Platform Support

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 adaptation of an operating system to an application is often needed to optimize the embedded code. Adaptation consists in removing the unneeded operating systems services and the dead code according to applications requirements. The resulting stripped operating system is smaller, safer and has better performance. This adaptation is usually done by hand for each application. As a result some dead code may remain unnoticed. The verification and the certification of the adapted operating system is difficult too: for each adaptation to an application, the certification must be redone and for the verification, a new model has to be designed with the well known gap problem between the model and the actual software. In this paper, we present a new approach based on formal methods to synthesize an Application-Specific Real-Time Operating System. Instead of removing services from the source code of an existing operating system, a formal model is used. All the functions of the operating system with the full control flow and control variables are modeled. According to an application model, unneeded services and part of control flow are removed from the model by using a reachability analysis. This guarantees no dead code remains. Moreover some properties may be checked on the pruned model to ensure the application behaves as expected. At last, the corresponding source code is generated from the model.

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 & 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.

This project work was carried out using LINUX to build a customised Operating System (OS) for Raspberry pi. Customization of operating system for Raspberry pi is a way of eliminating some things in the default build of the OS. Using raspberry pi to build a customised operating system explains how operating system can be customised and at the same time avoid problems of achieving satisfactory levels of system performance and reliability when operating systems are built in mini computers. Raspberry pi is a smali-sized computer system with a lot of benefits such as: strong processing power in a compact board, several interfaces (HDMI, multiple USB, ONBOARD Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), support for many languages (e.g., LINUX and python) among others.

In the Grid environment, user can manage and make use of web services, such as uploading or downloading web services. But when user wants to download one web services to run it in a local machine, one problem may occur: The web service can only be run on a special operating system, which is not the operating system that the user operates. To solve this problem, we need construct one middleware to emulate the running environment of the web service in the operating system that user operates. Middleware is the component created by the Operation System according to its metadata, and it is also the center from which the Internet technology extended. Component-based middleware has emerged as an important architectural component in modern distributed systems, such as XPCOM, UNO and the CORBA Component Model. Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a middleware, aimed at making application cross platform to run. The goal of our research is to extend this work in order to exploit one component-based middleware platform that can make web services to run on different operating system platforms, such as Elastos, Windows and Linux operating system. In this paper, a new and efficient component model based on COM (ezCOM) is proposed. More specifically, this paper describes in detail how ezCOM can be used to construct a full component-based crossing Operating system middleware platform and also puts forward one new measure model to compare the performance of ezCOM, Wine-COM, XPCOM and UNO.

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.

Programmers write and edit their source code in a text editor. However, when they design the look-and-feel of a game application such as an image of a game character and an arrangement of a button, it would be more intuitive to edit the application by directly interacting with these objects on a game window. Although modern game engines realize this facility, they use a highly structured framework and limit what the programmer can edit. In this paper, we present CapStudio, a development environment for a visual application with an interactive screencast. A screencast is a movie player-like output window with code editing functionality. The screencast works with a traditional text editor. Modifications of source code in the text editor and visual elements on the screencast will be immediately reflected on each other. We created an example application and confirmed the feasibility of our approach.

As a standard of operating system in automotive industry, OSEK/VDX is applied on dozens of mature industrial operating systems and widely installed on the products of major automotive manufacturers. In this empirical report, we introduce our experience on verifying OSEK/VDX real-time operating system. From both source code and binary code level, the OSEK/VDX operating system is verified based on approaches comprising Hoare Logic, Communicating Sequential Processes, Binary Code Analysis and Discrete-Time Markov Chains model checking. Based on our approach, a commercial OSEK/VDX standard automotive operating system is verified and it is proved to be of great help to the development of software.

SummaryIn this paper we describe our experience in identifying and developing safety mechanisms to improve spatial isolation within the AUTOSAR Operating System (OS) in order to allow the usage of cores with mixed integrities. We show that simple write operations on shared OS data structures performed by OS core running on low ASIL cores, e.g. ASIL A core, can impact on the behavior of code running on higher ASIL cores and may lead to AUTOSAR OS malfunctions. In particular, we focus on cross-core AUTOSAR API calls, by which a core executes an AUTOSAR API over some other core, like activating a task or retrieving a task status running on some other core.Therefore, we firstly show that the usage of well-known redundancy mechanisms increases the detectability of such cascading failures. Then, we performed a reformat of some internal data structures of our AUTOSAR OS implementation in order to reduce the possibility for low ASIL core to interfere with higher ASIL cores. In particular, we analyzed the entire OS source code in order to reduce the size and number of data structures that are not needed to be shared among cores. Next, we propose and implement a delegation mechanism coming from the networking domain, i.e., the Remote Procedure Call (RPC). With this mechanism, in case a cross-core API is used by a low ASIL core, all the operations on data structures are performed by the higher ASIL core, so that the spatial isolation among cores is guaranteed.Finally, we evaluated the impact on the OS performance of the redundancy and RPC mechanisms allowing the usage of low ASIL cores on a Tricore architecture. In fact, using the redundancy mechanisms after the data structure reformat increases the overhead for executing a single AUTOSAR OS API function (e.g., ActivateTask). In contrast, we show that the RPC mechanism introduces an acceptable overhead for the high ASIL cores in case cross-core AUTOSAR OS APIs are used. Hence, the overhead introduced by the proposed mechanisms can be acceptable since it allows to increase the computational power by using mixed ASIL cores without cascading failures from the safety point of view.

This paper describes an implementation of a client caching system which supports disconnected and partially connected modes of operation while preserving the traditional role of client caching (improved response time) in the fully connected mode. The system is designed to facilitate various server-dependent verification protocols. The need for the heterogeneous server support stems from the fact that the mobile user is likely to access various network services, transfer data between them and use the data in the local unit application programs. The unique feature of this project is its implementation which does not require modification of the native system's kernel source code. The paper shows that an installable file system is a viable mechanism for providing such file system extensions without source code modifications. The results of our preliminary experiments indicate efficiency of the design and the feasibility of the implementation mechanism used.

Joining mobility and learning environments to provide a great flexibility and reuse are main goals to educational software developers. Those requirements allow the user to deal with a lot of learning objects anytime and anywhere in simple handhelds. The integration provided by Internet and mobile device changes the developer methodologies to the issue of creating new subjects. The question that then arises is no longer to produce the software I need, but where to find it and how to integrate it with the software already used in devices to construct a customized educational environment. Integrations imply modifications in the source code, usually requiring hard work on source code modifications with a high cost. However, those environments are still developed in a monolithic way, out of a development view based on a composition of learning objects, much easier to match. This paper describes a architecture which promotes software integration through the utilization of Web services.

This paper proposes a transparent packet pre-marking method named QLR (QoS Library Redirection) for DiffServ. This method can upgrade legacy applications to obtain packet pre-marking ability without any modification of source codes. In this case, users are allowed to purchase high or low service quality according to their requirements. The major techniques of QLR include the dynamic linking of shared libraries and the function call redirection. We have upgraded the vic application by using QLR in our FreeBSD testing platform. The experimental results can show the effectiveness of the QLR.

Laboratory work is an essential part of the learning experience in many areas of Computer Science, and this is particularly true in the area of operating systems. To support laboratory work in operating systems, we have created SunOS Minix, a version of the Minix operating system that runs as a process under Sun Unix (SunOS). To date, projects for two advanced classes on operating systems have involved extensive work with the SunOS Minix source code. Also, we are in the process of developing a novel graphical monitoring and control interface that will make SunOS Minix a powerful tool for use in introductory operating system laboratories.

Visualization has been taking a role of much importance in both science and business areas. For scientists, visualization is a method to gain the meaning of and insight from scientific data and computational results; for business marketing area, computer visualization is popular as a digital signage technology. Recently, tiled display wall (TDW) has gathered users' attention and concern as a promising large-scale visualization technique. SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) is a representative middleware for realizing such a TDW and experimentally used in an inquisitive way at research institutions and universities. However, this SAGE has an undesirable problem that existent X-window based visualization applications are not displayed without source code modification, although it provides a suite of APIs with which developers can write visualization applications displayed on the SAGE-enabled TDW. In this paper, we present an adapter solution that allows users to display X-window application on the SAGE-based TDW without source code modification. In our evaluation, the developed adapter solution incurred a small overhead in displaying an X application onto a SAGE-enabled TDW, in comparison with the case of modifying the source code of it.

With the rapidly advancing technology of today, exchange of information and data is a very pertinent matter. The world has just recently witnessed the effects of information leakage through the issue of WikiLeaks. There are huge amounts of data being shared over different platforms nowadays. Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) is one of the most reliable platforms known to and used by almost all people in the world for text as well as voice communication. With the tools like Android Studio and NetBeans available, it is now possible to encrypt the text that has to be sent over the GSM, so that it can be decrypted at the other end of the communication path. However, the encryption and decryption of voice being transmitted over the GSM network still remains a question. In the domain of real time voice encryption, much of the work being carried out pertains to the voice being exchanged through the Internet Protocol. As compared to the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), voice over the GSM network has not seen much research work related to its security aspects. The purpose of this paper is to document the results of a project aimed at developing a platform for mobile phones in order to communicate over the GSM network in a secure manner. The most suitable method for achieving the above mentioned objective is to use an open source Operating System (OS), so that the source code is easily accessible and usable. In this paper, the Android OS will be under discussion, which is compatible with all the Android mobile phones. In this way, the maximum number of mobile phone users can be benefitted because Android cell phones are being widely used nowadays. The use of cryptographic algorithms for securing the voice communication over the GSM network is also a part of this paper. The work revolves around the Java programming language since the Android application development has been carried out in Java through the use of Android Studio. Also, NetBeans has been employed for developing algorithms for voice encryption