Making Device Access Less Peripheral
Speaker: Mike Swift , University of Wisconsin
Date: September 26 2011
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 32-G449 (Patil/Kiva)
Host: Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT CSAIL
Contact: Nickolai Zeldovich, x3-6005, nickolai@csail.mit.edu
Supporting peripheral devices, once a motivation for creating operating
systems, has received little attention from the research community.
However, device access, whether for storage, networking, or graphics, is a
major source of complexity, unreliability, and cost for modern operating
systems.
In this talk, I will present two approaches to treating device access as a
first-class topic. First, we investigated the reliability of device
drivers in the presence of faulty devices and found there are many drivers
that will crash or hang when a device fails. We address this problem with
Carburizer, a code-manipulation tool and associated runtime that detects
and repairs such bugs.
I will then discuss our work on storage devices that support direct access
by applications. New storage-class memory (SCM) technologies, such as
phase-change memory, promise user-level access to non-volatile storage
through regular memory instructions. We built Mnemosyne, a simple
interface for programming with persistent memory that addresses two
challenges: how to create and manage such memory, and how to ensure
consistency in the presence of failures.
---
Mike Swift is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. His research focuses on the hardware/operating system boundary,
including devices drivers, new processor/memory technologies, and
transactional memory. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts and received a
B.A. from Cornell University in 1992. After college, he worked at
Microsoft in the Windows group, where he implemented authentication and
access control functionality in Windows Cairo, Windows NT, and Windows
2000. He received a Ph.D. on operating system reliability from the
University of Washington in 2006.
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