Reexamining the Foundations: Improving Basic OS Memory Management Techniques

Despite significant advancements in operating system memory management, our understanding of the desired behavior of fundamental techniques introduced decades ago is sometimes incomplete or not well-defined. This can result in correctness issues that might cause the system to crash or be compromised, as well as missed opportunities for optimizations. In this talk, I will present two specific examples of this: (1) the inefficiencies in synchronizing the memory view across different CPU cores, and (2) the undefined behavior of the interactions between two common memory management mechanisms, copy-on-write and pinning.

Bio: Nadav Amit is a senior researcher in VMware Research. He received his PhD in 2014 from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology for his work on alleviating of virtualization bottlenecks. He is a recipient of the SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award, IBM Fellowship Award and an honorable mention of the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award. His current research revolves operating systems and virtualization and focuses on memory management.