Overall objectives
The focus of Whisper is on how to develop (new) and improve (existing) infrastructure software. Infrastructure software (also called systems software) is the software that underlies all computing. Such software allows applications to access resources and provides essential services such as memory management, synchronization and inter-process interactions. Starting bottom-up from the hardware, examples of infrastructure software include operating systems, virtual machine hypervisors, managed runtime environments, and standard libraries. For such software, efficiency and correctness are fundamental. Any overhead will impact the performance of all supported applications. Any failure will prevent the supported applications from running correctly. Whisper addresses these dual problems of infrastructure software performance and correctness, both in a given instance of the software and as the software evolves.
In terms of methodology, Whisper is at the interface of the domains of operating systems, software engineering and programming languages. Our approach is to combine the study of problems in the development of real-world infrastructure software with concepts in programming language design and implementation, e.g., of domain-specific languages, and knowledge of low-level system behavior. A focus of our work is on providing support for legacy code, while taking the needs and competences of ordinary system developers into account. We will put an emphasis on achieving measurable improvements in performance and correctness in practice, and on feeding these improvements back to the infrastructure-software developer community.
We focus on two main axes. The first axis, system performance, targets the performance of applications, in both bare-metal and virtual environments, based on the impact of operating-system services. This direction not only involves proposing new algorithms, but also designing tools and methodologies to help developers understand the system behavior. When addressing these areas, we will explore the use of DSLs, when appropriate, to enhance the usability, configurability, reliability, and robustness of the proposed approaches. The second axis, system re-engineering, targets the quality of legacy infrastructure software. Infrastructure software tends to evolve faster than many of its users are able to keep up with, leading to massive ecosystem fragmentation. Building on tools such as Coccinelle for automating widespread code changes, we will investigate how to facilitate and improve the reliability of the maintenance of such variants, for example in terms of identifying, adapting, and applying relevant bug fixes.
