CAREER:Exploiting Gray-Box Techniques in Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Modern operating systems are large and complex code bases in whichhundreds of programmer-years have been invested. As a result,modifying an operating system is a difficult, costly, and oftenimpractical endeavor. However, viewing the OS as an immutable objectis at odds with most OS research.This research proposes techniques that enable the deployment of OSideas without changing OS source code. The thesis is that an OS-likeservice can acquire information about the internal state of the OS andcontrol its behavior, even when no explicit interfaces to do so areprovided. With this approach, the OS is treated as a gray box, inwhich the general characteristics of its algorithms are known; thisknowledge is then combined with run-time observations of how the OS reactsto probes in order to infer its state and exert control.Initial experience with gray-box systems points to additional areas ofresearch: automated discovery of algorithms, on-line benchmarking toconfigure parameters, dynamic insertion of probes, and aggressiveinference of OS internal state. Thus, the goal of this proposal istwo-fold: to understand the theoretical foundations of gray-boxsystems and to implement a toolbox of software for the rapiddevelopment of gray-box systems.