Michał Cierniak : Rotor - general

Secure CRT

michaljc — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 04:27:00 GMT

One of the cool new things we are doing in the security push is the conversion of all uses of potentially unsafe CRT (C Runtime) functions to their new, safe counterparts. When we think of unsafe CRT functions, we usually think of string manipulation functions and these functions are probably indeed responsible for most of the security bugs
(For a few examples of what can go wrong with the traditional string manipulation functions, read this post) but there are other improvements in the CRT libraries. As mentioned on MSDN the main categories of improvement in CRT are: parameter validation, sized buffers, null termination, enhanced error reporting, file system security, Windows security, and format string syntax checking.

Resources
For a great introduction to Secure CRT, read this article by Michael Howard. A list of secure CRT functions with short descriptions and links to longer articles is available in the Whidbey section of MSDN. Secure CRT is also mentioned by another blogger. A clever way of using templates to avoid typing the extra parameter when the compiler can deduce it itself is described here.

Rotor
Secure CRT functions are being discussed in the context of the ISO/IEC standard for C (in JTC1/SC22/WG14). You can read the submission and the Security TR Editor's Report online. However, since these functions have not been added to the C standard yet and we want to compile Rotor Whidbey on non-Windows platforms, we will include implementations of some of the secure CRT functions in the Rotor distribution. Our current plan is to include only as much as we need for Rotor, so this will not be a complete implementation.

Open Source Courses for .NET

michaljc — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 02:05:00 GMT

Open source courses based on .NET are a great resource both for creating courses at other universities and for people who simply want to use the materials to learn something on their own about either .NET in general or Rotor. I know of two such courses available today from the University of Linz in Austria (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz):

Application Development with C# and .NET. I am posting this before I had time to fully explore the web site but apparently there are 700 slides worth of presentations (equivalent to 30 45-minute lectures, in German and English), 200 exercises with sample solutions, a larger case study and references to books that have been written for the course (books are also both in German and English).
Compiler Construction. Again, I haven’t actually read any of this yet but this seems to be a very cool compiler class with over 300 slides and a case study of a complete compiler for Z# (I’ve never heard of Z# and I assume that it must be a language of the level of complexity appropriate for a compiler class).

Other .NET-related materials are available on a companion web site.

Rotor benchmarks

michaljc — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 04:21:00 GMT

To date there has been no standard set of benchmarks that do something meaningful, run on Rotor and execute long enough to enable performance measurements. Standard benchmarks are very important for publishing research results because they make easier to understand what applications are being presented in a given paper. Ben Zorn from MSR has just published two benchmarks. Hopefully, this is just a start and either Ben or others will put together more applications, so that we have a benchmark suite of 5-10 applications that can be used by all researchers looking into .NET.

The two benchmarks available today are lcsbench and ahcbench. Lcsbench is a front end of C# compiler written in C#. Ahcbench is an implementation of Adaptive Huffman Compression. Both benchmarks include three inputs of various sizes that achieve different execution times.

Do you know of other nicely packaged benchmarks for .NET? Do they run on Rotor? Let me know!

IVNET'05

michaljc — Sat, 29 May 2004 01:51:00 GMT

IVNET’05 (Conference of Innovative Views of .NET Technologies) is another conference related to CLI. Its scope is actually much larger but the CFP lists a few areas relevant to my Rotor blog. The two most obvious ones are programming languages and CLI implementations. IVNET’05 will be held in Porto, Portugal in June 2005.

Slides from MSR Academic Days in Portugal

michaljc — Fri, 28 May 2004 22:50:00 GMT

I returned yesterday from the MSR Academic Days. These events were quite interesting. Organizers of the event in Portugal made the slides used for presentations available on-line.

Slides for my Rotor presentations are there. In addition to Rotor, the presentation also mentions Semiworks and Phoenix at a very high level (two slides for each of these projects).

There are also other interesting presentations there: Don Syme about innovation in .NET. Damien Watkins had three talks: about Comega (Comega has its own web site), multi-language programming and .NET in teaching. Bruno Cabral talked about RAIL. Ivan Medvedev talked about Security in CLR. Other talks were not about .NET but they were all good (some talks were in Portuguese, so I didn't listen to them myself but I heard they were good).

Rotor RFP2 recipients

michaljc — Tue, 18 May 2004 14:13:00 GMT

As mentioned earlier, we have the final list of researchers awarded grants for proposed work related to Rotor. The list is now public. Check it out: there are many very exciting projects there.

A servicing update of Rotor

michaljc — Sat, 15 May 2004 02:38:00 GMT

Jan has just announced that he created a project with the modifications needed to build and run Rotor on versions of MacOS, FreeBSD and Windows that were released since Rotor was shipped. This servicing project is available at http://servicing.sscli.net

The following new OS versions are supported:

Windows XP SP2
Windows Server 2003
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
FreeBSD 5.2

Rotor talks at MSR Academic Days in May

michaljc — Wed, 12 May 2004 04:29:00 GMT

I will be giving talks about Rotor next week in Vilamoura in Portugal and the week after that in Barcelona in Spain. If you are interested in Rotor and will be around there, let me know even if you will not attend these events.

Rotor BOF notes

michaljc — Tue, 11 May 2004 02:36:00 GMT

Last Thursday I went to the Birds-Of-A-Feather session about Rotor at the Virtual Machine (VM'04) conference. There were over a dozen attendees. Most people haven't done much work with Rotor yet and they were there out of curiosity. I managed to write down names of most but not all of the participants. If I missed you and you want to be included, please let me know.

John Gough had handouts of the newly written Appendix D for his book. This part talks about unsafe code and unmanaged data.
Neal Glew from Intel talked about their experiences integrating a new JIT and GC into Rotor. This work will be presented at the .NET workshop in a few weeks.
Lingli Zhang, a graduate student from UCSB, is considering using Rotor for her thesis.
Deepak Chandra, a grad student from UC Irvine, is considering using Rotor for his information flow work.
Mark Lewin from MSR was helping me present the winners of the Rotor RFP2. A few people asked for a link to a web page with that list but I think that it's not available yet (I will try to find out). The list of RFP1 winners is online.
Yahya Mirza announced a workshop he's organizing for OOPSLA.
Tarek Abdelrahman from the University of Toronto, Hans Boehm from HP and a few others were just listening.
Gil Tene and Ivan Posva from Azul Systems were asking questions about Pinvoke and interop with native code and wrote down the info I showed them about pinvoke.net and Adam Nathan's .NET and COM book.

Rotor BOF at the VM'04 conference in San Jose

michaljc — Mon, 03 May 2004 05:34:00 GMT

I wanted to remind you about the Birds-of-a-Feather session devoted to Rotor at the VM'04 conference this week. The BOF is scheduled for Thursday, May 6, 7:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m. You can find a description at http://www.usenix.org/events/vm04/bofs.html. The BOF is co-organized by John Gough, Peter Drayton and me. For those who cannot attend, I will write a short report after the BOF.

Rotor BOF is now on the USENIX web site

michaljc — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:16:00 GMT

The Birds-of-a-Feather session about Rotor at VM’04 that I mentioned earlier is now officially scheduled at the conference web site: http://www.usenix.org/events/vm04/bofs.html - it is scheduled for the evening of Thursday, May 6. I hope that we can hear a lot of interesting reports about work done on Rotor.

Popularity of the Rotor book

michaljc — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 01:19:00 GMT

Peter has recently pointed out to me that the “Shared Source CLI Essentials” book is quite popular on Amazon. If you look at Amazon’s page for the book, you will see that it is number 1 for readers in Redmond, WA and number 5 for Microsoft. I’m not sure what the latter “purchase circle” is… Are these people who work at Microsoft? Or people who buy books about Microsoft products? In any case, these statistics are very cool for a book that describes internals of an implementation. I would expect that general books that describe .NET or C# should be more popular.

What does this prove? It probably means that many developers really want to understand what goes on under the hood of hot new technologies. And this is a very good source of information if you want to learn about Rotor. Furthermore many things are done the same way in Rotor and the commercial CLR, so you can get a glimpse at how the CLR is implemented. I would recommend this book.

Rotor Birds-of-a-Feather Session at VM'04

michaljc — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 04:16:00 GMT

John Gough, Peter and I are organizing a Rotor BoF at the VM’04 conference in May in San Jose. Watch this space or one of the two Rotor mailing lists (http://www.mail-archive.com/dotnet-rotor%40discuss.develop.com/ and http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/) for details. Peter queried about interest in this BoF on the mailing lists and we know that Rotor users will show up.

This is a good opportunity to mention a few other workshops and conferences that are related to the Rotor technology.

MRE’04 at the CGO will take place in March, also in San Jose.
.NET Technologies Workshop in May in Prague.
IVME’04 in June in Washington, DC.

Chances are that someone from the Rotor team may be at these and other upcoming conferences. When I go, I may mention it here to find out if anyone wants to meet and chat.

Yet another blogger writing about Rotor

michaljc — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 01:31:00 GMT

Check out a new blog by Yun Jin. A yet another person from the CLR team with a lot of interesting insights about our source code.

Replacing GC in Rotor

michaljc — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 00:01:00 GMT

I talked on Thursday to Steve Blackburn and Andrew Gray who work on porting JMTk to Rotor. JMTk is a memory management toolkit that is used to implement high-performance garbage collectors. The source code of the port of JMTk to Rotor is available at http://jmtk-sscli.sscli.net/. This is work-in-progress but people interested in adding GC to Rotor should probably have a look. I hope that as part of his work Andrew will come up with an interface between a memory manager that matches both JMTk and Rotor’s own GC. Andrew visited us last week and we had an interesting chat about his work.

It occurred to me that many other people are working on replacing the GC in Rotor. I wonder if it would make sense that they all got together and created some kind of a clearinghouse for GC issues. Certainly everyone who wants to plug in a new GC into Rotor will have to solve similar issues of decoupling the old GC and plugging in a new one. Presumably most researchers will come up with a new, improved interface. It would be great if all this work wasn’t duplicated.

I don’t have a complete list of who’s playing with GC in Rotor but off the top of my head I can think of a few projects. First, there is the JMTk work. There were two projects funded as the result of Rotor RFP v1: one by Darko Stefanovic from the University of New Mexico and one by Paulo Ferreira from INESC in Portugal. Emails on Rotor mailing lists suggest that more people are looking into implementing GC on Rotor: concurrent GC by Archana Ravindar from the Indian Institute of Science, another GC by Todd Anderson from Intel, and there are probably many others I haven’t run across yet. And, surely, Rotor RFP v2 will receive new proposals for GC research.

If anyone knows of more GC projects done in Rotor, please post comments to my blog and I will summarize the responses.