Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs

CSG

• Title: Proving Concurrent Multi-Core Operating Systems

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of Sydney (Australia) - Willy Zwaenepoel

• Start year: 2019

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/csgroup/

• The initial topic of this cooperation is the development of proved multicore schedulers. Over the last two years, we have explored a novel approach based on the identification of key scheduling abstractions and the realization of these abstractions as a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), Ipanema. We have introduced a concurrency model that relies on execution of scheduling events in mutual execution locally on a core, but that still permits reading the state of other cores without requiring locks.

  In the three next years, we will leverage on our existing results towards the following directions: (i) Better understanding of what should be the best scheduler for a given multicore application, (ii) Proving the correctness of the C code generated from the DSL policy and of the Ipanema abstract machine, (iii) Extend the Ipanema DSL to the domain of I/O request scheduling, (iv) Design of a provable complete concurrent kernel.

Inria International Partners

Informal International Partners

Julia Lawall and Gilles Muller collaborate with David Lo and Lingxiao Jiang of Singapore Management University in the context of the ANR-NRF funded project ITrans. This project supports the PhD of Lucas Serrano. In 2019, this collaboration led to an experience paper at ECOOP on a transformation tool (a variant of Coccinelle) for Java [21] and a tool paper at ICSE on using machine learning for identifying bug-fixing patches for the Linux kernel [19]. The latter has been extended to a journal article published in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering [11]. Lawall and Serrano spent two weeks visiting Lo and Jiang at Singapore Management University in December 2019.

Julia Lawall collaborates with Jia-Ju Bai at Tsinghua University on bug finding for the Linux kernel. In 2019, this collaboration led to a paper at SANER on detecting data races in device drivers [17], a paper at ISSRE on extending Linux kernel fuzzing to be able to detect bugs in error-handling code [20], a paper at ASPLOS on detection of unnecessary spinning in the Linux kernel [14], a paper at USENIX ATC on detection of use-after free concurrency bugs in the Linux kernel [13]. Bai visited the Whisper team for 2 months starting in January 2019. Lawall visited Bai at Tsinghua University for one week in August.

Michele Martone of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich, Germany has been using Coccinelle in an HPC context and giving workshops on Coccinelle in the HPC research engineer community. Martone has contributed some patches to Coccinelle and we keep in touch with him about possible improvements to Coccinelle that may have an impact on its use in the HPC community.