Advanced Operating Systems Spring 2025

(See canvas for homework assignments and due dates).

(Ed discussion course site). Note that numbered entries in the non-required reading section are highly encouraged.

Date Topic Reading Non-required Reading
Tue
01/14 
Course Intro

 1)  How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper (Levin and Redell, SIGOPS OSR, 1983)
 2)  On Being the Right Size (Haldane, 1928)  lecture slides

  You and Your Research(Hamming 1986)

Thu
01/16 
OS Design

 1)  The UNIX Timesharing System (Ritchie and Thompson, SOSP, 1974) lecture slides prose notes
 2)  End-to-end Arguments in System Design  -- (through page 4) -- (Saltzer, Reed, and Clark, TOCS, 1984) prose notes

  The Linux Edge (Linus Torvalds, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution 1999)
  Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack (Hunt and Larus, SIGOPS OSR, 2007)
  THE (Dijkstra, 1968)
  Application performance and Flexibility on Exokernel Systems (Kaashoek, Engler, Ganger, Briceno, Hunt, Mazieres, Pinckney, Grimm, Jannotti, and Mackenzie, SOSP, 1997)
  On Micro-Kernel Construction (Liedtke, SOSP, 1995) notes

Tue
01/21 
OS design (guest lecture Chris Rossbach)

 1)  Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management (Engler, Kaashoek, and O'Toole Jr., SOSP, 1995) lecture slides prose notes
 2)  A fork() in the road (Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger, Timothy Roscoe, HotOS, 2019)

  The Wrong Patient (Chassin and Becher, American College of Physicians - American Society of Internal Medicine, 2002)
  Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm (New York Times 2010 flash animation)
  The Task of the Referee (Smith)

Thu
01/23 
OS Design (guest lecture Chris Rossbach)

 1)  The Rise of Worse is Better (Richard Gabriel, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big, 1989) lecture slides
 2)  Medical Devices, The Therac-25 (Levinson, Safeware: System Safety and Computers, 1995) SKIM! lecture slides

  Threads and Input/Output in the Synthesis Kernel (Massalin and Pu, SOSP, 1989) lecture slides prose notes
  Chapter 6 from Massalin's Thesis (1992)
  Protection and the Control of Information Sharing in Multics (Saltzer, 1974)

Tue
01/28 
Virtual machines

 1)  Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization(Chapter 1, 3.3, 3.4, Chapter 4, Chapter 5) (Bugnion, Nieh, Tsafrir, Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture)

  Xen and Art of Virtualization (Barham, Dragovic, Fraser, Hand, Harris, Ho, Neugebaur, Pratt and Warfield, SOSP 2003). lecture notes prose notes
  Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right? (Hand, Warfield, Fraser, Kotsovinos, and Magenheimer, HotOS 2005) lecture notes
  Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right? (Heiser, Uhlig, and LeVasseur, SIGOPS OSR, 2006)
  Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors (Bugnion, Devine, and Rosenblum, SOSP, 1997) notes
  The Turtles Project: Design and Implementation of Nested Virtualization (Ben-Yehuda, Day, Dubitzky, Factor, Har’El, Gordon, Liguoriz, Wasserman, Yassour, OSDI 2010)

Thu
01/30 
Memory management

 1)  Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server (Waldspurger, OSDI, 2002) lecture slides prose notes

  Unix as an Application Process (Golub, USENIX, 1990)
  Compatibility is not transparency VMM detection myths and realities (Garfinkel, Adams, Warfield, and Franklin, HOTOS, 2007)

Tue
02/04 
Virtual memory

 1)  Practical, transparent operating system support for superpages (Navarro, Iyer, Druschel, and Cox, OSDI 2002) lecture slides
 2)  Understanding the Linux Kernel (3rd Edition) Chapter 9, Process Address Space (skim)

  Coordinated and Efficient Huge Page Management with Ingens (Kwon, Yu, Peter, Rossbach, Witchel, OSDI 2016)
  Machine-Independent Virtual Memory Management for Paged Uniprocessor and Multiprocessor Architectures (Rashid, Tevanian, Young, Golub, Baron, Black, Bolosky, and Chew, 1987)

Thu
02/06 
Containers and VMs

 1)  My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container (Manco, Lupu, Schmidt, Mendes, Kuenzer, Sati, Yasukata, Raiciu, Huici, SOSP 2017)Skip section 5 and 7. lecture slides
 2)  LCE: The failure of operating systems and how we can fix it (Kerrisk, LWN.net, 2012)link
 3)  Namespaces in operation, part 1: namespaces overview (Kerrisk, LWN.net, 2013)link

  X-Containers: Breaking Down Barriers to Improve Performance and Isolation of Cloud-Native Containers (Shen, Sun, Sela, Bagdasaryan, Delimitrou, Van Renesse, Weatherspoon, ASPLOS, 2019) Read up to and including Section 3.
  Cells: A Virtual Mobile Smartphone Architecture (Andrus, Dall, Van’t Hof, Laadan, Nieh, SOSP 2011)

Tue
02/11 
Catch up

Thu
02/13 
File systems

 1)  Crash Consistency: FSCK and Journaling (R. Arpaci-Dusseau, A. Arpaci-Dusseau)
 2)  A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications (Harter, Dragga, Vaughn, A. Arpaci-Dusseau, R. Arpaci-Dusseau, SOSP 2011) lecture slides

  A Fast File System for UNIX (McKusick, Joy, Leffler, and Fabry, TOCS, 1984) prose notes
  Disks from the Perspective of a File System (Marshall Kirk McKusick, ACM Queue, 2012)
  Improving the Performance of fsck in FreeBSD (Marshall Kirk McKusick 2013)

Tue
02/18 
File systems

 1)  The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System (Rosenblum and Ousterhout, TOCS, 1992)lecture slides prose notes
 2)  Ousterhout's critique of Seltzer's 1993 paper
 3)  Ousterhout's critique of Seltzer's 1995 paper
 4)  Seltzer's response to Ousterhout's critiques
 5) 
Ousterhout's response to Seltzer
 6)  Log structured file systems: There's one in every SSD (Valerie Aurora (formerly Henson), LWN 2009)

  Design and Implementation of the SUN Network Filesystem (Sandberg, Goldberg, Kleiman, Walsh, and Lyon, USENIX, 1985) lecture slides prose notes
  XDR: External Data Representation Standard (M. Eisler, Ed., RFC 4506, 2006) txt
  Remote Procedure Calls (Birrell and Nelson, TOCS, 1984) notes
  An Introduction to Disk Drive Modeling (Ruemmler and Wilkes, 1994)
  Soft Updates: A Technique for Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes in the Fast Filesystem (McKusick and Ganger, USENIX, 1999)

Thu
02/20 
Catch up

Tue
02/25 
Kernel extensibility

 1)  XRP: In-Kernel Storage Functions with eBPF (Zhong, Li, Wu, Zarkadas, Tao, Mesterhazy, Makris, Yang, Tai, Stutsman, Cidon, OSDI 2022) related slides

  Arrakis: The Operating System is the Control Plane (Peter, Li, Zhang, Ports, Woos, Krishnamurthy, Anderson, Roscoe. OSDI, 2014) lecture slidesprose notes
  Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down (Porter, Boyd-Wickizer, Howell, Olinsky, and Hunt, ASPLOS 2011)
  Dune: Safe User-level Access to Privileged CPU Features (Belay, Bittau, Mashtizadeh, Terei, Mazieres, Kozyrakis, OSDI 2012)

Thu
02/27 
Data center file systems

 1)  The Google File System (Ghemawat, Gobioff, and Leung, SOSP, 2003) lecture slides prose notes

  GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward (McKusick and Quinlan, ACM Queue, 2009)

Tue
03/04 
Data center

 1)  MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (Dean and Ghemawat, OSDI, 2004) lecture slides
 2)  MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards (DeWitt and Stonebreaker, 2008)

  A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis (Pavlo, Paulson, Rasin, Abadi, DeWitt, Madden, Stonebreaker, SIGMOD 2009)
  BigTable: A system for Distributed Structured Storage (Chang, Dean, Ghemawat, Hsieh, Wallach, Burrows, Chandra, Fikes, and Gruber, OSDI, 2006)webnotesvideo
  Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications (Peng and Dabek, OSDI 2010)
  Brewer's CAP Theorem (Browne 2009)
  Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database (Corbett, Dean, Epstein, Fikes, Frost, Furman, Ghemawat, Gubarev, Heiser, Hochschild, Hsieh, Kanthak, Kogan, Li, Lloyd, Melnik, Mwaura, Nagle, Quinlan, Rao, Rolig, Saito, Szymaniak, Taylor, Wang and Woodford, OSDI, 2012)
  Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store

Thu
03/06 
Data races

 1)  RaceTrack: Efficient Detection of Data Race Conditions via Adaptive Tracking (Yu, Rodeheffer, and Chen, SOSP, 2005) lecture slides notes
 2)  The "Double-Checked Locking is Broken" Declaration (Bacon, Bloch, Bogda, Click, Haahr, Lea, May, Maessen, Mitchell, Nilsen, Pugh, Sirer, 2004)
 3)  Exchange between Linus Torvalds and David Patterson about parallelism Part 1
 4)  Part 2
 5)  Part 3

  Introduction to Non-blocking IO (Kegel 1999)
  Event-driven Programming for Robust Software (Dabek, Zeldovich, Kaashoek, Mazieres, and Morris, SIGOPS, 2002)
  Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) (von Behren, Condit, and Brewer, HOTOS, 2003)
  Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management (Adya, Howell, Theimer, Bolosky, Douceur, USENIX 2002)

Tue
03/11 
Sustainability

 1)  Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon (Wang, Berger, Kazhamiaka, Irvene, Zhang, Choukse, Frost, Fonseca, Warrier, Bansal, Stern, Bianchini, Sriraman, ISCA 2024) conference slides

Thu
03/13 
Exam

 1)  Exam in class.

Tue
03/18 
Spring break

Thu
03/20 
Spring break

Tue
03/25 
Concurrency and Transactions

 1)  Operating System Transactions (Porter, Hofmann, Rossbach, Benn, and Witchel, SOSP, 2009) lecture slides
 2)  TxOS OSDI 2008 rejected intro
 3)  TxOS ASPLOS 2009 rejected intro
 4)  TxOS HotOS 2009 intro

  Experiences with transactions in QuickSilver (Shmuck and Wyllie, SOSP 1991)

Thu
03/27 
Concurrency and Transactions

 1)  Ordering concurrent events and transactions in Principles of Transaction Processing (second edition by Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer 2009)
 2)  The Art of Multiprocessor Programming (Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, 2008) Sections 3-3.6 lecture slides

  Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter 1993)
1.1 - 1.2.5, 4.2, 4.7 and 4.7.1, 4.9 and 4.9.1, 7.1-7.6
  The Transaction Concept (Gray, 1981) notes

Tue
04/01 
Catch up (guest lecture Brent Waters)

Thu
04/03 
Distributed computing (guest lecture Brent Waters)

Tue
04/08 
Security

 1)  17 Mistakes Microsoft Made in the Xbox Security System (Steil, 2005) lecture slides
 2)  The Confused Deputy (Hardy, SIGOPS OSR, 1988) lecture notes

  A VMM Security Kernel for the VAX Architecture (Karger, Zurko, Bonin, Mason, Kahn, IEEE Oakland Security, 1990)
  Authentication in Distributed Systems: Theory and Practice (Lampson, Abadi, Burrows, and Wobber, TOCS, 1992) notes
  A Logic of Authentication (Burrows, Abadi, and Needham, TOCS, 1990) notes

Thu
04/10 
Security

 1)  Ryoan: A Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data (Hunt, Zhu, Xu, Peter, Witchel) lecture slides

  Overshadow: a virtualization-based approach to retrofitting protection in commodity operating systems (Chen, Garfinkel, Lewis, Subrahmanyam, Waldspurger, Boneh, Dwoskin, Ports, ASPLOS 2008)
  InkTag: Secure Applications on an Untrusted Operating System (Hofmann, Dunn, Kim, Lee, Witchel, ASPLOS 2013)
  Information flow control for standard OS abstractions (Krohn, Yip, Brodsky, Cliffer, Kaashoek, Kohler, and Morris, SOSP, 2007)

Tue
04/15 
GPUs

 1)  PTask: operating system abstractions to manage GPUs as compute devices (Rossbach, Currey, Silberstein, Ray, Witchel, SOSP 2011) lecture slides

  TensorFlow: A system for Large-scale Machine Learning (Abadi et al., OSDI 2016)

Thu
04/17 
Exam 2

 1)  Exam in class.

  Hints for Computer System Design (Lampson, SIGOPS OSR, 1983)
  A Note on the Confinement Problem (Lampson, Communications of ACM, 1973)
  Reflections on Trusting Trust (Thompson, Turing Award Lecture, 1984)

Tue
04/22 
Project due

Thu
04/24 
Project due

Fri
04/25:
Additional reading

  The Many Faces of Systems Research - And How To Evaluate Them (Brown, Chanda, Farrow, Fedorova, Maniatis, Scott, HotOS 2005)
  A Decentralized Model for Information Flow Control (Myers and Liskov, SOSP, 1997)
  Laminar: Practical Fine-Grained Decentralized Information Flow Control (Roy, Setty, Kilzer, Shmatikov, Witchel, PLDI 2009)
  Improving Application Security with Data Flow Assertions (Yip, Wang, Zeldovich, and Kaashoek, SOSP, 2009)
  Why Cryptosystems Fail (Anderson, 1994)
  Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects (Herlihy and Wing, TOPLAS, 1990)
  Klee: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs (Cadar, Dunbar, and Engler, OSDI, 2008)
  A few billion lines of code later: using static analysis to find bugs in the real world (Bessey, Block, Chelf, Chou, Fulton, Hallem, Henri-Gros, Kamsky, McPeak, Engler, CACM v53 no 2, 2010)
  Weird things that surprise academics trying to commercialize a static checking tool (Chou, Chelf, Hallem, Hanri-Gros, Fulton, Unangst, Zak, and Engler, SPIN, 2005)
  EROS: A Fast Capability System (Shapiro, Smith, and Farber, SOSP, 1999)
  Capsicum: practical capabilities for UNIX (Watson, Anderson, Laurie, Kennaway, USENIX security 2010) notes