Title: Scaling addressing spaces and improving integer security in Linux

Time: 15:10 - 17:00, March 27th

Meeting Room: FIT 1-312

Speaker: Frans Kaashoek and Nickolai Zeldovich (MIT CSAIL)

Abstract: We will describe two recents results that we have implemented in the Linux operating system. First, we describe a new design for a virtual memory system, inspired by RCU, that allows address space operations to scale well to many cores. Our changes improve the scalability of a multi-core MapReduce library on an 80-core machine from 22x to 75x.

Second, we describe a tool, KINT, for finding integer errors that can lead to security exploits. KINT helped us find and fix nearly 100 such bugs in the Linux kernel.

Joint work with: Austin Clements, Xi Wang, and Haogang Chen

Bio: M. Frans Kaashoek is a full professor in MIT's EECS department and a member of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he coleads the parallel and distributed operating systems group (http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/). He received a PhD (1992) from the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for his work on group communication in the Amoeba distributed operating system, under the supervision of A.S. Tanenbaum. Frans's principal field of interest is designing and building computer systems. In collaboration with students and colleagues, his past contributions include the exokernel operating system, the Click modular router, the RON overlay, the self-certifying file system, the Chord distributed hash table, and the Asbestos/Flume secure operating system. Frans is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of several awards, including the inaugural ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award and the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation award.

Nickolai Zeldovich is an Associate Professor at MIT's department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in building practical secure systems, from operating systems and hardware to programming languages and security analysis tools. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008, where he developed HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code by controlling information flow. In 2005, he co-founded MokaFive, a company focused on improving desktop management and mobility using x86 virtualization. Prof. Zeldovich received a Sloan fellowship in 2010, and an NSF CAREER award in 2011.