Operating System Group (OSG)

Winter is coming and the ELFs have a lot of work to do in Santa's Christmas village. And the ELFs, as the name suggests, are big fans of Linux to get this work done in time. However, until now they only know about those old a crusty interfaces that we inherited from UNIX/POSIX. So, they require your help! On the way, you can learn something about old and new system calls of Linux.

The Operating System Group at the Hamburg University of Technology perpared a System-Call Advent calendar with 24 strace-filled doors for you. On every day of December, you will find a system-call, a concept or an interface of Linux that you might or might not yet know. Behind the door, there is a short article and a small programming exercise, for which we provide a commented solution on the following day.

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.