welcome

Hello! This is the project blog for Ben Blum's 5th year master's project at CMU, under the advisory of Garth Gibson and working with Jiří Šimša.

Jiří has a project called dBug, which does runtime concurrency verification on userland programs by interposing itself between the application under test and the dynamic libraries, thereby to control the nondeterministic aspects of the program's execution. I hope to extend these same ideas to work in kernel-space, where concurrency issues can be much more intricate and subtle.

15-410 - Operating System Design and Implementation - is a class at CMU where students, in a six-week-long project, implement a small UNIX-like kernel, called Pebbles, from the ground up. Students do most of their development in Simics, an x86 simulator, and typically produce code which has many race conditions, which have to be spotted either by the student during the project or by the grader after the project.

I aim to develop a system for race condition detection on Pebbles kernels in the form of a Simics module, to be used by the 410 course staff to help grade student submissions and by the students to help debug their code, and hopefully to serve as a starting point for similar tools in more complicated environments (i.e., industrial kernels such as Linux).

The project is called landslide because it shows that pebbles kernels are not as stable as one might hope.