Binary translation is a powerful approach to support cross-architecture emulation of unmodified binaries in increasingly heterogeneous computing environments. However, binary translation systems face correctness issues, due to the strong-on-weak memory model mismatch (e.g., from x86-64 to Arm/RISC-V) for concurrent programs. Besides, the current landscape of binary translation systems is fundamentally limited in terms of completeness for static systems and performance for dynamic ones.

Modern systems featuring multiple sockets suffer from the non-uniformity of performance of their memory accesses. Accessing memory of a remote node can lead to doubled latencies and halved bandwidth. This is particularly critical for I/O-intensive applications relying on the Linux page cache, where locality is paramount. Existing solutions migrating threads or memory across nodes fail to address the issue with highly parallel workloads, where a small working set is constantly accessed by multiple threads across nodes.

Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) is a powerful approach to support cross-architecture emulation of unmodified binaries. However, DBT systems face correctness and performance challenges, when emulating concurrent binaries from strong to weak memory consistency architectures. As a matter of fact, we report several translation errors in QEMU, when emulating x86 binaries on Arm hosts.

Lightweight virtual machines (VMs) are prominently adopted for improved performance and dependability in cloud environments. To reduce boot up times and resource utilisation, they are usually "pre-baked" with only the minimal kernel and userland strictly required to run an application. This introduces a fundamental trade-off between the advantages of lightweight VMs and available services within a VM, usually leaning towards the former. We propose VMSH, a hypervisor-agnostic abstraction that enables on-demand attachment of services to a running VM---allowing developers to provide minimal, lightweight images without compromising their functionality. The additional applications are made available to the guest via a file system image. To ensure that the newly added services do not affect the original applications in the VM, VMSH uses lightweight isolation mechanisms based on containers. We evaluate VMSH on multiple KVM-based hypervisors and Linux LTS kernels and show that: (i) VMSH adds no overhead for the applications running in the VM, (ii) de-bloating images from the Docker registry can save up to 60% of their size on average, and (iii) VMSH enables cloud providers to offer services to customers, such as recovery shells, without interfering with their VM's execution.

The emergence of new architectures create a recurring challenge to ensure that existing programs still work on them. Manually porting legacy code is often impractical. Static binary translation (SBT) is a process where a program’s binary is automatically translated from one architecture to another, while preserving their original semantics. However, these SBT tools have limited support to various advanced architectural features. Importantly, they are currently unable to translate concurrent binaries. The main challenge arises from the mismatches of the memory consistency model specified by the different architectures, especially when porting existing binaries to a weak memory model architecture.

Recent research and bug reports have shown that work conservation, the property that a core is idle only if no other core is overloaded, is not guaranteed by Linux's CFS or FreeBSD's ULE multicore schedulers. Indeed, multicore schedulers are challenging to specify and verify: they must operate under stringent performance requirements, while handling very large numbers of concurrent operations on threads. As a consequence, the verification of correctness properties of schedulers has not yet been considered.

The complexity of computer architectures has risen since the early years of the Linux kernel: Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), multicore processing, and frequency scaling with complex algorithms such as Intel® Turbo Boost have all become omnipresent. In order to keep up with hardware innovations, the Linux scheduler has been rewritten several times, and many hardware-related heuristics have been added. Despite this, we show in this paper that a fundamental problem was never identified: the POSIX process creation model, i.e., fork/wait, can behave inefficiently on current multicore architectures due to frequency scaling. We investigate this issue through a simple case study: the compilation of the Linux kernel source tree. To do this, we develop SchedLog, a low-overhead scheduler tracing tool, and SchedDisplay, a scriptable tool to graphically analyze SchedLog's traces efficiently.

Operating systems have been shown to waste machine resources by leaving cores idle while work is ready to be scheduled. This results in suboptimal performance for user applications, and wasted power.