CSC Flash

Books

Thanks to Jiten Chauhan, a Microsoft Student Consultant, we now have three new books. There were even free, as in beer. Come by the office to have a look at the pretty new books.

Mini-conf 2002

• 13:30: GNU/Linux on HPPA by Carlos O'Donnell
• 15:00: The Hurd interfaces by Marcus Brinkmann
• 16:30: A GNU Approach to Virtual Memory Management in a Multiserver Operating System

Mini-conf 2002 will be happening on 26 Oct 2002 in the MC and snacks and drinks will be available.

For other events look on our website http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca or read the lookAHEAD.

GNU/Linux on HPPA, the last of the legacy processors to fall before the barbarian horde

This talk will be given by Carlos O'Donnell of the University of Western Ontario on Saturday, 26 Oct 2002, at 1:30 pm.

The Hurd interfaces

The Hurd server interfaces are at the heart of the Hurd system. They define the remote procedure calls (RPCs) that are used by the servers, the GNU C library and the utility programs to communicate with the Hurd system and to implement the POSIX personality of the Hurd as well as other features.

This talk is a walk through the Hurd RPCs, and will give an overview of how they are used to implement the system. Individual RPCs will be used to illustrate important or exciting features of the Hurd system in general, and it will be shown how those features are accessible to the user at the command line, too.

This talk will be given by Marcus Brinkmann from the University of Ruhr Bochum, in Germany, on Saturday, 26 Oct 2002, at 3:00 pm.

A GNU Approach to Virtual Memory Management in a Multiserver Operating System

Virtual memory management is one of the cornerstones of multiuser operating systems. Most systems available today place all of the policy in a monolithic virtual memory manager, VMM, isolated from the rest of the system. Although secure and lightweight, users have no way to communicate their anticipated memory needs and usage to the system pager. As a result, the VMM can only implement a global paging policy (typically, an approximation of LRU) which may be good on average but is best for nobody.

With the port of Hurd to the L4 microkernel, this situation is being readdressed. Due to its more distributed nature, a centralized resource manager is not only more difficult to implement efficiently but also contrary to the philosophy of the rest of the system. We are currently exploring a model whereby each program is fully self-paged and all compete for memory from a physical memory server. This talk will first discuss how paging currently works in Mach and other systems. An argument for an external paging policy will then be presented followed by the requirements of such a design and the design itself.

This talk will be given by Neal H. Walfield from the University of Massachusetts Lowell on Saturday, 26 Oct 2002, at 4:30 pm.

James A. Morrison