Theo de Raadt explains why virtualization does not improve security. How about this: to improve security, you have to have a secure design, a marketing buzzword won’t do the trick. Anyone who has seriously looked that the current generation x86
The Linux community
According to Greg’s email, organizations that contributed more than 100 changesets to the recently released 2.6.23 kernel included: Red Hat with 827 changesets (11.7%), IBM with 557 changesets (7.9%), the Linux Foundation with 528 changesets (7.5%), Novell with 449 changesets
Distributed shared memory from first principles
[Update 10/16] What is the fundamental performance limiting factor that has dominated that last 30 years of computer architecture? The obvious answer is the disparity between processor and memory/storage speed. We connect processors to cache, to more cache, to even
Smart engineering design
Amy Smith and her work and her student
more on missed wakeup
Here are some conventions [Update: typos fix, Friday] We are concerned with state machines and sequences of events. The prefixes of a sequence include the empty sequence “null” and the sequence itself. Relative state: If “w” is the sequence of
Data structures and algebra
[Edited 9/10] There’s an easy connection between data structures and basic abstract algebra that may or may not mean anything, but keeps getting rediscovered. I’ve never seen it clearly explained (anyone with a reference or who notices an error in
Death of 1000 suboptimal solutions
The traditional path to making a slow operating system is to take a fast one and add features under the 5% rule. If a new feature does not visibly slow the system down or only slows it down 5% or
The lost wakeup problem
One basic problem in operating system design is how to make efficient blocking requests. Thread A wants something from Thread B (or ISR B) and (1) requests and (2) blocks. There are thousands of ways in which the interval between