Operating System Group (OSG)

At this years SAFECOMP'22, we presented two papers on fault injection of transient hardware faults: Christian Dietrich presented our paper SailFAIL, where we explain how to derive fault-injection platforms form formal CPU models. Tim-Marek Thomas presented ACTOR, an method how to use dynamic timeout detectors to speed up large fault-injection campaigns.

Tobias Landsberg presents our paper TASTING: Reuse Test-case Execution by Global AST Hashing at the 17th International Conference on Sofware Technologies (ICSOFT '22) in Lisbon. In the paper we describe TASTING, an approach for efficiently selecting and reusing regression-test executions across program changes, branches, and variants in continuous integration settings. TASTING can dramatically speed-up test suite executions by recursively composing hashes of all relevant syntatic elements into a semantic fingerprint of the test and its execution environment, so identical test executions can easily be detected and skipped. This is an important building block for variant-aware testing in the CADOS project.

Tobias got the Best Student Paper award for this work!

ParPerOS: Parallel Persistency OS (DFG: DI 2840/2-1)

In ParPerOS, we examine new abstractions for unified but efficient and optionally crash-consistent low-level memory management for data objects in heterogeneous memory systems that consist of volatile, persistent, distributed and other types of main memory.

ParPerOS is part of the DFG Priority Program "Disruptive Memory Technologies" (SPP 2377). DFG is supporting us for three years with two positions for doctoral researchers (E13, one at OSG), two positions for student researchers (one at OSG), and some additional lab equippment. ParPerOS is a cooperation project with the SRA group from Daniel Lohmann.

The Priority-Strict Interrupt Controller (PSIC) delivers prioritized interrupt requests in a multi-core system. Thereby, the PSIC ensures that always the highest-priority interrupt handlers are run on our CPUs. Christian Dietrich presented our Paper PSIC: Priority-Strict Multi-Core IRQ Processing at ISORC'22, where our work was awarded as one of two Outstanding Papers.

Traditionally, memory is the scarce resource that operating systems virtualize for their users. However, current hardware trends, like ultra-fast NVMe SSDs and non-volatile RAM, force us to rethink operating system-mediated management. We no longer have to manage scarcity, but we have to swim in the new abundance without drowning. In his inaugural lecture, Christian Dietrich will present three ongoing research projects that center around the topic of memory management. For more OSG talks, see the OSG Oberseminar (ICS included).

Am 17./18 März fand das Frühjahrstreffen GI/ITG Fachgruppe Betriebssysteme in Hamburg statt. In Zusammenarbeit mit Prof. Janick Edinger von der Universität Hamburg hat die Operating System Group das Treffen als hybride Veranstaltung organisiert. Insgesamt waren 50 Teilnehmende vor Ort und bis zu 30 Teilnehmende virtuell an dem Treffen beteiligt. Einen Überblick über das Program gibt es auf der Seite der Fachgruppe.

For the ring lecture in this semester, the three new juniorprofessors (Lal, Dietrich, Kulau) will shortly present their teaching and some of their research projects. Join us either in person at the TUHH or attend virtually with an Ethernet-lengths distance. For more OSG talks, see the OSG Oberseminar (ICS included).

ATLAS: Adaptable Thread-Level Address Spaces (DFG: DI 2840/1-1)

In the ATLAS project, we investigate dynamic specialization and containment by means of thread-level address-space variations.

The German research foundation DFG is supporting our ATLAS project for two years with two positions for doctoral researchers (E13, one at OSG), two positions for student researchers (one at OSG), and some additional lab equippment. ATLAS is cooperation project with the SRA group from Daniel Lohmann.

Yannick Loeck joins the OSG team as Doctoral Researcher. He will strengthen our research team and, in the upcoming semesters, he will assist in our Master's courses (Betriebssystembau, Operating System Techniques). Welcome, Yannick!

With our tool CppSig, we can extract type signatures for C preprocessor macros, which gives us a better understanding of macro heavy source bases. Christian Dietrich presented an initial version of CppSig at the PLOS'2021 workshop: CppSig: Extracting Type Information for C-Preprocessor Macro Expansions.

Bald ist es soweit! Das Wintersemester beginnt und damit auch eine weitere Runde der Lehrveranstaltung zum Thema Betriebssysteme: Operating System Techniques. Auch dieses mal wollen wir in den Innereien unseres Lehrbetriebssystems herumstochern. Diesmal wollen wir uns ein Semester mit dem Thema "Speichervirtualisierung" und Privilegienisolation widmen. Am Ende wird unser Lehrbetriebssystem OOStuBS echte Prozesse haben, die sich mittels fork() vervielfältigen können. Kommunikation zwischen Prozessen findet dann durch effizientes Copy-on-Write statt.