Use of the concept of transparency in the design of hierarchically structured systems

Parnas, David Lorge; Siewiorek, D.P.

doi:10.1145/360881.360913

Cited by 59 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Some will propose the same for para-virtualization -a standard high-level interface used by all hypervisors and guest OSes -but this approach is deficient principally because abstractions lock-in architectural decisions [12,26], while in contrast, the neutral platform interface is expressive and powerful, permitting a variety of hypervisor architectures. Soft layering provides the architectural freedom we desire for hypervisor construction, even transparently supporting the hardware acceleration for virtualization of the latest processor generations (para-virtualization's abstractions interfere with transparent access to the new hardware features).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Design by layering involves choosing appropriate abstractions and cut points for the layer interfaces. Layering's abstractions provide benefits, but as explained by Parnas, the abstractions easily introduce inefficiencies due to the lack of transparency into the lower layers [26]; for example, the upper layer may have the impression that a resource is infinite, when the opposite is the case; or the upper layer may have an algorithm that maps well to a feature of the machine but which is hidden by the abstractions of the lower layer. Virtual machines have a problem with transparency, particularly since the guest OSes try to use the mechanisms of the hardware, but must instead use abstractions that result from the hypervisor multiplexing the hardware mechanisms.…”

Section: Strict Layeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pre-virtualization: Soft layering for virtual machines

LeVasseur

Uhlig

Yang

et al. 2008

2008 13th Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference

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Para-virtualization ties a guest operating system and a hypervisor together, which restricts the system architecture; e.g., when Linux uses the Xen API, Linux is unable to run on alternative hypervisors such as VMware, Linux itself, or a security kernel such as EROS. Furthermore, the lock-in obstructs evolution of its own paravirtualization interface -virtual machines provide the vital ability to run obsoleted operating systems alongside new operating systems, but para-virtualization often lacks this feature, requiring all concurrent instances to be the hypervisor's supported version. Even general purpose operating systems have weaker restrictions for their applications. This lock-in discards the modularity of virtualization; modularity is an intrinsic feature of traditional virtualization, helping to add layered enhancements to operating systems, especially when enhanced by people outside the operating system's development community (e.g., Linux server consolidation provided by VMware).Virtualization and its modularity solve many systems problems; combined with the performance of paravirtualization it becomes even more compelling. We show how to achieve both together. We offer a set of design principles, which we call soft layering, that govern the modifications made to the operating system. Additionally, our approach is highly automated, thus reducing the implementation and maintenance burden of paravirtualization, which is especially useful for enabling obsoleted operating systems. We demonstrate soft layering on x86 and Itanium: we can load a single Linux binary on a variety of hypervisors (and thus substitute virtual machine environments and their enhancements), while achieving essentially the same performance as para-virtualization with less effort.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Strict Layeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-virtualization: Soft layering for virtual machines

LeVasseur

Uhlig

Yang

et al. 2008

2008 13th Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference

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“…The stream i/o library of UNIX is another typical example of this situation. As already pointed out in [Parnas, Siewiorek 1972], such transparency considerations are of significant importance when specifying the functionality of and/or designing a service interface.…”

Section: @4 About Nel~work Transparencymentioning

confidence: 97%

A distributed process execution and communication environment for high-performance application systems

Schöder

1988

Experiences With Distributed Systems

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Simplicity is the slogan in order to design and implement highperformance communication systems. It is almost a natural consequence that simplicity in system design promotes a flexible and/or applicationoriented operating system implementation, too. With ~'EACE, a process execution and communication environment is explained in l;his paper which consequently follows the maxim of keeping things as simple as possible.

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“…The latter approach is more flexible. Exclusive operations violate Parnas's concept of transparency [4] for shared-memory multiprocessors, and prevent the implementation of generally useful abstractions such as wait-free queues, etc. Exclusive operations effectively make each object a monitor, which introduces the problems of nested monitors, such as deadlock due to nesting and the tricky semantics associated with non-blocking versus blocking waiting.…”

Section: Concurrent Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A uniform object model for parallel programming

Crowl

1988

SIGPLAN Not.

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This position statement presents a uniform object model of parallel programming that enables use of multiple programming styles, binding parallelism late, and porting programs among a wide variety of architectures. It then argues for concurrent operations on objects, as opposed to mutually exclusive operations on objects, based on orthogonality between encapsulation and concurrency. The final section argues for its relatively novel insistence on uniform control, based on the flexibility it provides the programmer. The Matroshka ModelA single parallel application may have several subproblems, each suited to a different programming style. Current imperative programming languages tend to support only one of three programming styles based on loosely coupled messages, remote procedure calls, or shared memory. Given a task with subproblems appropriate to different styles, a programmer must choose inappropriate styles for some subproblems, which implies awkward, error-prone code, or attempt to mix programming systems, which represents a substantial interface problem. A few programming languages support multiple styles, but do so with separate mechanisms. This separation increases the complexity of the language and forces the programmer to manage the boundary between mechanisms.Current approaches to parallel computation tend to provide separate facilities for parallel programming on top of a base sequential model. These facilities are typically a distinct notion of process, monitor constructs, messages, etc. This dichotomy between sequential and parallel aspects of programming forces programmers to bind the granularity of parallelism at program construction time. For instance, only specially defined program objects may execute concurrently with others. ttowever, the best binding is often not known until after performance experiments performed on a working program. Altering the program for a different binding of parallelism entails a substantial amount of work and limits the effectiveness of programmers'in exploiting multiprocessor hardware. This paper presents Matroshka (.btnTp~tuKa) I a model of parallel programming that enables programmers to use several styles of programming within the same simple framework and enables programmers to bind the granularity of parallelism late in program development. A consequence of the late binding is that programs may be effectively ported among a wide range of multiprocessor architectures. The model is a synthesis of a few concepts and is minimal in that the loss of a single concept severely degrades its expressive power. See [2] for a more complete description. The model may serve as a base for a wide variety of possible programming languages.

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Use of the concept of transparency in the design of hierarchically structured systems

Abstract: ABSTRACT

Cited by 59 publications

References 5 publications

Pre-virtualization: Soft layering for virtual machines

Pre-virtualization: Soft layering for virtual machines

A distributed process execution and communication environment for high-performance application systems

A uniform object model for parallel programming

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