Computer Sciences Colloquium - Evolving hardware and operating system interfaces using trustworthy methodologies

Abstract:

Hardware and operating system interfaces should ideally enable to build performant systems that are also robust and secure. Alas, these goals frequently conflict, necessitating unavoidable compromises that promote one goal at the expense of another. I nevertheless contend that existing compromises---while inherently imperfect---are often suboptimal, and that improved tradeoffs can be devised. I further contend that such progress should be achieved using an experimental methodology that is significantly more careful and reliable than the common ones. I support my claims using two case studies: (i) reducing the operating system overhead of synchronizing the memory view across different CPU cores, and (ii) helping to efficiently bridge the semantic gap between host and guest systems in virtualization setups.

Bio:

Nadav is a researcher in VMware's Research Group, Palo Alto, California. He received his PhD in 2014 from the Technion, after which he was a senior research associate in the Technion. Prior to his PhD studies, he worked at Intel. He is the recipient of the IBM Fellowship Award, the SPEC Distinguished PhD Dissertation Award, and the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral PhD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. His research focuses on operating systems and hardware-assisted virtualization.