[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

Bakul Shah bakul at bitblocks.com
Thu Jan 4 12:13:59 AEST 2018


On Wed, 03 Jan 2018 16:51:03 -0800 Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
Larry McVoy writes:
> On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 06:40:25PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 01:27:19PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > > > This slowdown (which is not much -- L4 shows it is about 5% or so)
> > > >
> > > ???I agree.   We came to the same conclusion in the early/mid 1990's  wit
> h
> > > Mach and Chorus.   In fact, the UI 'requirements for modern OS' document
> > > (which is part of why AT&T got behind Chorus for the never completed
> > > SVR5/R6 stuff - I'll see if I can find a copy) was based on that work.
> > > 
> > > The OS weenies at the time felt that the cost was low enough and hardware
> > > cheap enough that of course kernels would be the way to go.
> > 
> > It's possible to keep the slowdown at 5%, but how much extra
> > engineering work does it take to get the performance gap down to that
> > level?  And during that time while the micro kernel team is playing
> > catchup, if the OS with the monolithic kernel adds new features to the
> > OS, how much additional time does it take to add those features to the
> > OS?  (Regardless of whether the features are implemented in userspace,
> > or in the kernel, or some combination of the two.)

I can't find the specific paper that mentions 5% but see
Liedke's SOSP97 paper:
  https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pubs/sosp97/ 
He specifically mentions keeping porting effort low:
  "In particular, we felt that it was beyond our means to tune
  Linux to our -kernel in the way the Mach team tuned their
  single-server Unix to the features of Mach."

Also see  
  http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/adam-diplom.pdf
Where the author reports overall about 17-22% slow down
compared to native versions of Linux 2.4 or 2.6. Not sure if
these are multicore version or not.

https://l4linux.org/ shows L4Linux has been ported to
Linux-4.13.  It would be interesting to see its performance.
Port of 4.6 was announced in May 2016 and 4.7 in August 2016
so my guess is porting is more than just recompile but not a
very significant effort.

> To add to Ted's points.  I was good friends with one of the core guys
> on the QNX team a long time ago (he died early in 1998 of brain cancer.

Dan Hildebrand? I used QNX in 86 and had read his papers but never
met him.

> The problem is that most people / companies are not that disciplined.

The whole idea is not to hack on the ukernel endlessly but to
build apps on top of it. On something like Mill you won't even
need most of the features of ukernels like L4 or QNX. Best to
think of them as s/w emulation of needed h/w instructions
(just like we used to use s/w emulation of floating point math
on early 68K machines).

> Oh, we need this for $CUSTOMER and this for $BENCHMARK and this for
> $STANDARD and the easiest way to get it is to shove it into the kernel.

In my view this is a losing game - particularly it if is
played using performance as the main metric. The the single
most critical problem today is that of lax security, not a
lack of performance. It is no longer just the NSA or CIA
or banks that have to worry about bad guys stealing their
stuff. We all have to. Even stealing has been
democratized/massively empowered by the Internet!

My first unix box's CPU was 16 bit unicore cpu running at
5.6Mhz on a 256KB machine.  Today I am using 4 physical core,
8 hyperthreaded 64 bit CPU running at 2.5Ghz on a 16GB
machine.  But I certainly don't feel my productivity has gone
up even by a factor of 10.  Will I notice if the machine runs
10% slower if I can get more security? As I mentioned services
running in the cloud aren't necessary running most effciently.
So far just the single slowdown due to the Meltdown bug is
bigger than due to implementing unix on top of a ukernel. And
we don't even have a solution yet for Spectre.

> I'd argue that microkernels are indeed the best answer but only if you
> have the best programmers.  Which nobody does even though everyone claims
> they do.
> 
> Monolithic kernels are far more amenable to less than awesome people
> messing with them.  Sad but true, I'd love a microkernel world but I
> fear we are too stupid to get it.  Something, something, something,
> this is why we can't have nice things.

A monlithic kernel reimplemented as a set of services on top
of ukernel would be even more amenable. But there are too many
vested interests in the current state of the computer world.
This is the same point Roger Schell made near the end of his
interview (see the link in Noel Chiappa's message today).



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