OSDB: Turning the Tables on Kernel Data

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• George V. Neville-Neil, Elephance, Yale, Cambridge
• Thursday 23 January 2025, 15:00-16:00
• Computer Lab, FW11.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Richard Mortier.

Operating systems must provide functionality that closely resembles that of a data management system, but existing query mechanisms are ad-hoc and idiosyncratic. To address this problem, we argue for the adoption of a relational interface to the operating system kernel. While prior work has made similar proposals, our approach is unique in that it allows for incremental adoption over an existing, production-ready operating system. In this paper, we present progress on a prototype system called OSDB that embodies the incremental approach and discuss key aspects of the design, including the data model and concurrency control mechanisms. We present four example use cases: a network usage monitor, a load balancer, file system checker, and network debugging session, as well as experiments that demonstrate the low overhead for our approach.

Bio: George V. Neville-Neil, works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches courses on various subjects related to programming. His areas of interest are computer security, operating systems, networking, time protocols, and the care and feeding of large code bases. He is the author of The Kollected Kode Vicious and co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. For nearly twenty years he has been the columnist better known as Kode Vicious. Since 2014 he has been an Industrial Visitor at the University of Cambridge where he is involved in several projects relating to computer security. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of ACM , the Usenix Association, and IEEE . His software not only runs on Earth but has been deployed, as part of VxWorks in NASA ’s missions to Mars. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who currently lives in New York City. He is currently a PhD student at Yale University working with Robert Soulé, Avi Silberschatz and Peter Alvaro.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

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