Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP

Posted By: Adam Kinney | Aug 18th, 2006 @ 2:16 PM

It's been a while since we checked in with the Singularity folks over in MSR Redmond. You know, the usual suspects like Jim Larus and Galen Hunt. So, Charles went and visited them recently to see where they are with Singularity, see what they're up to, what's new... As you may expect, they are doing some really interesting work with, among other novel software constructs, SIPs (Software Isolated Processes). Learn all about them and how they are architected into the Singularity system. Yes, we get Galen on the whiteboard again. This time, you will also meet the newest member of the Singularity team, Mark Aiken, Software Developer, who's been working on some interesting hardware protection stuff in Singularity. It's always great to spend time with the Singularity folks. Oh yeah, this time we get a demo of Singularity.

Tags: Kernel, MS Research, OS, Software Composability

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KevinB

Thank you Adam.

Rebuilt my computer today and I ahve been trying to will myself to plug in speakers, you have finally give me a decent reason to do this.

Best (hopefully) channel9 video in a long time, can't wait to watch it.

Kevin

Edit:

OK, just finished watching it, absolutely excellent video, didn't disappoint. Definitely one of the most exciting projects in Microsoft at the minute. Also cool to see that the team are working with the likes of Tony Hoare, definitely gives it some serious credibility in my opinion, not that the team isn't credible as it is...

Just one thing, where is the demo? Did you guys not get a chance to do that, or are you just waiting for that tape to be encoded etc.?

AdamKinney
Agent of Change

The demo is available here. I'm glad you liked the video and although I'd like to take credit for it, I just posted the video for Charles while he was away. Hopefully you'll enjoy the demo just as much.

mwirth

Great stuff! I'd like to thank the team for spending so much time with Charles and C9! I enjoyed the four singularity videos a lot... i definitely need to check out spec# and see if it might have its place for my own efforts.

btw, you can get the paper on process isolation right here. checking out the other papers available on the singularity project's website is really worth the time.

Thanks again for the video!

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

Great video. It great to see what modern type safe languages can add to operating systems. It's also very clear, why they don't need any hardware boundaries and it's great to have the possiblity to draw custom hardware boundaries around processes or sets of processes.

A few questions:

Is Singularity a lot slower then traditional operating systems once hardware protection is activated?

How do you make sure that a pointer does not point to any address space of another process? Are there no classes in your C# dialect that allows that? Is there no IntPtr class and therefore no way to initialize a pointer with an int?

Cyonix
Me

The video was great. I love Singularity!! Definitely the way of the future. Please let us have a CTP to play with Big Smile

KevinB

littleguru wrote:

A few questions:

How do you make sure that a pointer does not point to any address space of another process? Are there no classes in your C# dialect that allows that? Is there no IntPtr class and therefore no way to initialize a pointer with an int?

I don't think their safe language (SPEC#) allows that. From the video, the way it works seems to be that a process can only use the memory pages that are supplied to it by the kernel, therefore it is up to the kernel not to supply to SIP's with memory thatcould be shared.

I think this is the reason for the hardware protection boundary, if there is an error in the kernel code etc, which is very unlikely, then the hardware protection can kick in and prevent processes from destroying each others data.

Again, that is just what I picked up from the 3 videos.

Kevin

KevinB

Cyonix wrote:

The video was great. I love Singularity!! Definitely the way of the future. Please let us have a CTP to play with

I don't think a CTP would be much fun, unless of course they supplied the source code with it, and I think the chances of that are (understandably) zero.

Pity

Kevin

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

KevinB wrote:

littleguru wrote:

A few questions:

How do you make sure that a pointer does not point to any address space of another process? Are there no classes in your C# dialect that allows that? Is there no IntPtr class and therefore no way to initialize a pointer with an int?

I don't think their safe language (SPEC#) allows that. From the video, the way it works seems to be that a process can only use the memory pages that are supplied to it by the kernel, therefore it is up to the kernel not to supply to SIP's with memory thatcould be shared.

I think this is the reason for the hardware protection boundary, if there is an error in the kernel code etc, which is very unlikely, then the hardware protection can kick in and prevent processes from destroying each others data.

Again, that is just what I picked up from the 3 videos.

Kevin

That could it be... But it would be great, if one of the guys (from the team) could provide a few informations on this.

KevinB

littleguru wrote:

That could it be... But it would be great, if one of the guys (from the team) could provide a few informations on this.

Yeah, hopefully after the weekend they come on and answer some questions, I remember after the last videos they were quite active in the forums.

Kevin