Modern Operating Systems Research Articles

RGrapCor: a tool for graphic correlation

Graphic correlation is a well-known biostratigraphical method that has been widely used for more than 40 years. During the 1980s, Kenneth Hood developed the program GraphCor, which was designed to run graphic correlation projects. However, the software was developed using DOS and it is no longer compatible with modern operating systems. To solve this issue, we developed rGraphCor, an open-source, free, and user-friendly application built within the R-for-computing environment and enhanced with the package Shiny, ensuring compatibility with Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. rGraphCor can use information from diverse sources including cores, ditch-cuttings, and outcrops to perform graphic correlation. The interactive nature of rGraphCor allows real-time updates, providing immediate feedback on correlation results. Additional R functions assist users in formatting their data, optimizing the analysis, and reducing errors. To demonstrate rGraphCor’s capabilities, we generated a randomized simulation of fossil data, representing hypothetical species across four sites with varying sampling patterns. This simulation showed the flexibility in handling diverse data sets and the robustness of its correlation capabilities. rGraphCor is available for public use, promoting transparency and collaboration in the biostratigraphic community.

Development of Ecological Low-Carbon Agriculture with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era: Features, Practical Issues, and Pathways

Agriculture is not only the source of carbon emissions, but also an important carbon sink. The development of low-carbon agriculture in China is closely related to achieving the national strategic goal of “dual carbon.” Reducing carbon emissions in China’s agricultural sector and accelerating the development of ecological low-carbon agriculture (ELA) are extremely important and urgent, both from the perspective of the long-term common welfare for mankind and from the perspective of maintaining the sustainable development of agriculture itself. However, ELA is still an emerging concept in China, and its connotation and characteristics are not yet clear. There is a lack of effective paths for orderly and scientific promotion of the development of ELA in China. Based on this, this paper focuses on the emerging concept of ELA and examines ELA with Chinese characteristics from the dimensions of connotation, features, practical issues, and pathways, aiming to provide guidance for the sustainable development of ELA in China. The research results indicate that there are regional development imbalances, low willingness of farmers to participate, insufficient technological reserves, and difficulties in realizing the value of ecological products in China’s ELA. It is necessary to improve the modern agricultural production and operation system, tap into the potential of agricultural emission reduction and carbon sequestration, build a technical system to support the development of ELA, and establish a sound mechanism for realizing the value of ecological products. By continuously improving the regional organizational capacity and performance of ELA, accelerating the advancement of ELA technology and demonstrating its regional promotion, and by establishing and continuously improving the support system for ELA, one can promote the sustainable development of ELA in China. In addition, the research findings of this paper can also provide reference for the ecological low-carbon development of the global agricultural sector, supporting the contribution of the agricultural sector to achieving high-quality global sustainable development goals.

Vectorized Numerical Algorithms to Solve Internal Problems of Computational Fluid Dynamics

The opportunities provided by new information technologies, object-oriented programming tools, and modern operating systems for solving boundary value problems in CFD described by partial differential equations are discussed. An approach to organizing vectorized calculations and implementing finite-difference methods for solving boundary value problems in CFD is considered. Vectorization in CFD problems, eliminating nested loops, is ensured through the appropriate data organization and the use of vectorized operations with arrays. The implementation of numerical algorithms with vectorized mesh structures, including access to internal and boundary mesh cells, is discussed. Specific examples are reported and the implementation of the developed computational algorithms is discussed. Despite the fact that the capabilities of the developed algorithms are illustrated by solving benchmark CFD problems, they enable a relatively simple generalization to more complex problems described by three-dimensional equations.

Application analysis of process state control in modern operating system

Application analysis of process state control in modern operating system

Application Prospect of Deadlock Detection and Removal Technology in Modern Operating System

Application Prospect of Deadlock Detection and Removal Technology in Modern Operating System

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND SELECTION OF A DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN DISTANCE LEARNING

The relevance of studying the discipline "Databases" for students of computer and engineering specialties is determined and their special needs and emphasis in learning are shown.
 The definition of the data model stored in the database is given. The features of the relational data model are considered, the main advantage of which is simplicity and accessibility for the user to understand and the availability of a fairly simple and at the same time powerful mathematical apparatus of set theory and relational algebra. The main educational elements of studying databases based on the relational data model are highlighted.
 The client-server architecture of modern DBMSs is described. The advantages of client-server technologies in the process of learning to work with databases are noted.
 The results of the study of the functionality of existing software products for working with databases have shown the expediency of choosing MySQL Community Edition as a training tool, which is free and in its functionality is not inferior to commercial systems by any criteria. The disadvantages of the system, which include some limitations when executing complex queries and creating analytical reports that require a high load and a large number of simultaneous queries, are not critical for training purposes. The MySQL server can be accessed both from a console client running any of the modern operating systems and from many GUI clients. The paper describes the software product MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which is offered by Oracle for free use both as part of the MySQL server and as a separate GUI client.
 As a result of the study, it was concluded that the free MySQL Community Edition DBMS together with the MySQL Workbench Community Edition GUI client fully develops the competencies of students of both engineering and computer specialties in working with databases and can be used in the study of the educational component "Databases" in the context of distance education.

Simple Tool for Rapidly Assessing the Quality of Multiplexed Single Cell Proteomics Data.

Recent advances in the sensitivity and speed of mass spectrometers coupled with improved sample preparation methods have enabled the field of single cell proteomics to proliferate. While heavy development is occurring in the label free space, dramatic improvements in throughput are provided by multiplexing with tandem mass tags. Hundreds or thousands of single cells can be analyzed with this method, yielding large data sets which may contain poor data arising from loss of material during cell sorting or poor digestion, labeling, and lysis. To date, no tools have been described that can assess data quality prior to data processing. We present herein a lightweight python script and accompanying graphic user interface that can rapidly quantify reporter ion peaks within each MS/MS spectrum in a file. With simple summary reports, we can identify single cell samples that fail to pass a set quality threshold, thus reducing analysis time waste. In addition, this tool, Diagnostic Ion Data Analysis Reduction (DIDAR), will create reduced MGF files containing only spectra possessing a user-specified number of single cell reporter ions. By reducing the number of spectra that have excessive zero values, we can speed up sample processing with little loss in data completeness as these spectra are removed in later stages in data processing workflows. DIDAR and the DIDAR GUI are compatible with all modern operating systems and are available at: https://github.com/orsburn/DIDARSCPQC. All files described in this study are available at www.massive.ucsd.edu as accession MSV000088887.

A buffer overflow detection and defense method based on RISC-V instruction set extension

Buffer overflow poses a serious threat to the memory security of modern operating systems. It overwrites the contents of other memory areas by breaking through the buffer capacity limit, destroys the system execution environment, and provides implementation space for various system attacks such as program control flow hijacking. That makes it a wide range of harms. A variety of security technologies have been proposed to deal with system security problems including buffer overflow. For example, No eXecute (NX for short) is a memory management technology commonly used in Harvard architecture. It can refuse the execution of code which residing in a specific memory, and can effectively suppress the abnormal impact of buffer overflow on control flow. Therefore, in recent years, it has also been used in the field of system security, deriving a series of solutions based on NX technology, such as ExecShield, DEP, StackGuard, etc. However, these security solutions often rely too much on the processor architecture so that the protection coverage is insufficient and the accuracy is limited. Especially in the emerging system architecture field represented by RISC-V, there is still a lack of effective solutions for buffer overflow vulnerabilities. With the continuous rapid development of the system architecture, it is urgent to develop defense methods that are applicable to different system application environments and oriented to all executable memory spaces to meet the needs of system security development. Therefore, we propose BOP, A new system memory security design method based on RISC-V extended instructions, to build a RISC-V buffer overflow detection and defense system and deal with the buffer overflow threat in RISC-V. According to this method, NX technology can be combined with program control flow analysis, and NX bit mechanism can be used to manage the executability of memory space, so as to achieve a more granular detection and defense of buffer overflow attacks that may occur in RISC-V system environment. In addition, The memory management and control function of BOP is not only very suitable for solving the security problems in the existing single architecture system, but also widely applicable to the combination of multiple heterogeneous systems.Graphical abstract

ANALYSIS OF INFORMATION SECURITY AND THE PRESENCE OF PEOPLE IN THE CONTROLLED AREA BASED ON COMPUTER NETWORK TRAFFIC LISTENING

Service functions of modern operating systems allow passive monitoring ("listening") of computer network traffic without the use of additional tools and additional equipment. Such functions can be used to control information security by detecting the appe

SCENARIO OF INFORMATION FLOW ANALYSIS IMPLEMENTATION IN PL/SQL PROGRAM UNITS WITH PLIF PLATFORM

Formal proof of security measure effectiveness and computation security is vitally important for trust in critical information systems. It should be realized that formal security verification must be carried out at each infrastructural level (from the hardware level to the application level) in the process of system design. Currently, computation security analysis on the application level remains the major challenge as it requires complex labeling of computing environment elements. Traditionally, to solve this problem, information flow control (IFC) methods are employed. Unlike access control mechanisms widely used in modern operating systems (OSs) and database management systems (DBMSs), IFC has limited application in software design and mostly comes down to trivial taint tracking. This paper describes an approach to full-fledged implementation of IFC in PL/SQL program units with the use of the PLIF platform. In addition, a general scheme of computation security analysis for enterprise applications that work with relational DBMSs is considered. The key advantage of our approach is the explicit separation of functions between software developers and security analysts.

Tigger: A Database Proxy That Bounces with User-Bypass

Developers often deploy database-specific network proxies whereby applications connect transparently to the proxy instead of directly connecting to the database management system (DBMS). This indirection improves system performance through connection pooling, load balancing, and other DBMS-specific optimizations. Instead of simply forwarding packets, these proxies implement DBMS protocol logic (i.e., at the application layer) to achieve this behavior. Consequently, existing proxies are user-space applications that process requests as they arrive on network sockets and forward them to the appropriate destinations. This approach incurs inefficiencies as the kernel repeatedly copies buffers between user-space and kernel-space, and the associated system calls add CPU overhead.This paper presents user-bypass, a technique to eliminate these overheads by leveraging modern operating system features that support custom code execution. User-bypass pushes application logic into kernel-space via Linux's eBPF infrastructure. To demonstrate its benefits, we implemented Tigger, a PostgreSQL-compatible DBMS proxy using user-bypass to eliminate the overheads of traditional proxy design. We compare Tigger's performance against other state-of-the-art proxies widely used in real-world deployments. Our experiments show that Tigger outperforms other proxies --- in one scenario achieving both the lowest transaction latencies (up to 29% reduction) and lowest CPU utilization (up to 42% reduction). The results show that user-bypass implementations like Tigger are well-suited to DBMS proxies' unique requirements.

From Large to Powerful: International Comparison, Challenges and Strategic Choices for China’s Livestock Industry

Accelerating the construction of a strong livestock industry is of great significance to better guarantee the supply of livestock products and improve the quality, efficiency and competitiveness of the industry. This study constructed an evaluation index system including supply security, scientific and technological support, industrial resilience and international trade to evaluate the strength of China’s livestock industry, and then conducted an in-depth analysis of the issues and challenges of the construction of a livestock powerhouse. The research results showed that China’s livestock industry ranked 5th in the world, such that China was transitioning from being a large-producing livestock country to being a livestock powerhouse, although improvement was still needed to reach the goal. There were significant differences across species. China’s layer industry was a world leader; the pig, sheep and goat, and broiler industries were strong; and the beef cattle and dairy industries were weaker. There are still many challenges, such as the fact that the domestic supply security capacity needs to be strengthened, the level of scientific and technological support needs to be improved, the modern operation system needs to be sound, the industry and supply chain are not highly resilient, the international trade risks are increasing, and the policy support system needs to be improved. It is recommended to improve the institutional mechanism for the construction of the livestock industry, promote a high level of self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology, build a modern livestock operation system, enhance the resilience and security level of the industry and supply chain, and consolidate and expand international trade and cooperation.

Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management

Most database management systems cache pages from storage in a main memory buffer pool. To do this, they either rely on a hash table that translates page identifiers into pointers, or on pointer swizzling which avoids this translation. In this work, we propose vmcache, a buffer manager design that instead uses hardware-supported virtual memory to translate page identifiers to virtual memory addresses. In contrast to existing mmap-based approaches, the DBMS retains control over page faulting and eviction. Our design is portable across modern operating systems, supports arbitrary graph data, enables variable-sized pages, and is easy to implement. One downside of relying on virtual memory is that with fast storage devices the existing operating system primitives for manipulating the page table can become a performance bottleneck. As a second contribution, we therefore propose exmap, which implements scalable page table manipulation on Linux. Together, vmcache and exmap provide flexible, efficient, and scalable buffer management on multi-core CPUs and fast storage devices.

Antivirus Evasion Methods in Modern Operating Systems

In order to safeguard one’s privacy while accessing the internet, it is crucial to have an antivirus program installed on the device. Despite their usefulness in protecting against malware, these programs are not foolproof. Cybercriminals have access to numerous techniques and tools for circumventing antivirus software, which can greatly aid them in their illicit activities. The objective of this research was to examine the most prevalent methods and tools for bypassing antivirus software and to demonstrate how readily accessible and simple they are to use. The aim of this paper is to raise awareness among readers about the associated risks and to assist internet users in protecting themselves from potential threats. The findings of the research indicate that the efficacy of evasion tools is positively correlated with their age and popularity. Tests have shown that, with the latest updates, contemporary antivirus software is capable of resisting virtually all of the tested methods generated using default settings. However, the most significant aspect of this paper is the section presenting experiments with basic but powerful modifications to established evasion mechanisms, which have been found to deceive modern, up-to-date antivirus software.

A Comparative Study of Modern Operating Systems in terms of Memory and Security: A Case Study of Windows, iOS, and Android

Modern computer systems have an operating system, which serves as an interface between the device and the user and has the dual objectives of making the device easier to operate and making optimal use of device resources. The operating system offers some level of computer security like user authentication, file permission, firewall, encryption etc., but occasionally, problems develop due to societal or technical challenges like: vulnerable to malicious programs and viruses, which can cause the system to become sluggish or malicious actors be able to have an access to confidential user data, which compromise computer security. This comparative study provides insight into each of these operating systems and their relative strengths and weaknesses. The paper begins by discussing the concepts of memory management and security in general and then examines the specifics of each OS's memory management and security features. A case study of three popular applications is presented to illustrate how memory management and security features can be used in practice. The results of the comparison show that while each operating system has its own advantages and disadvantages, Windows is generally the most powerful and secure of the three, while iOS and Android offer more flexibility and ease of use.

TriCache: A User-Transparent Block Cache Enabling High-Performance Out-of-Core Processing with In-Memory Programs

Out-of-core systems rely on high-performance cache sub-systems to reduce the number of I/O operations. Although the page cache in modern operating systems enables transparent access to memory and storage devices, it suffers from efficiency and scalability issues on cache misses, forcing out-of-core systems to design and implement their own cache components, which is a non-trivial task. This study proposes TriCache, a cache mechanism that enables in-memory programs to efficiently process out-of-core datasets without requiring any code rewrite. It provides a virtual memory interface on top of the conventional block interface to simultaneously achieve user transparency and sufficient out-of-core performance. A multi-level block cache design is proposed to address the challenge of per-access address translations required by a memory interface. It can exploit spatial and temporal localities in memory or storage accesses to render storage-to-memory address translation and page-level concurrency control adequately efficient for the virtual memory interface. Our evaluation shows that in-memory systems operating on top of TriCache can outperform Linux OS page cache by more than one order of magnitude, and can deliver performance comparable to or even better than that of corresponding counterparts designed specifically for out-of-core scenarios.

Adapt Burstable Containers to Variable CPU Resources

In the age of the cloud-native, container technology, referred as OS-level virtualization, is increasingly adopted to deploy cloud applications. Compared with virtual machines, containers are lightweight and flexible in resource management. An important quality-of-service (QoS) class in container management is burstable container, whose resource limits are higher than the actual requests allowing a container to expand whenever demands ramp up and additional resources become available. However, efficiently managing burstable containers is challenging, especially for CPU resources. On the one hand, burstable containers should maintain sufficient concurrency, in the form of threads, to utilize extendable CPU resources. On the other hand, the degree of concurrency necessary for utilizing peak CPU resources leads to suboptimal performance when a container's CPU allocation is constrained. In this paper, we recommend that the number of threads in burstable containers should always be set to the CPU limit to guarantee extensibility. However, modern operating systems (OSes) fall short of efficiently managing thread oversubscription. First, the OS CPU scheduler is inefficient for scheduling excessive threads and lacks container awareness. Second, the existing blocking synchronization supported by the OS kernel is inefficient in handling the sleep and wakeup of excessive threads. Finally, the non-blocking synchronization may waste CPUs performing busy waiting when more than one thread in the run queue. To this end, we present a user-level adaptive container scheduler and two OS mechanisms, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">virtual blocking</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">busy-waiting detection</i> , to avoid inefficiency in managing burstable containers without requiring program code changes. Experimental results show that our approaches can keep burstable containers efficient while allowing the applications in containers to take advantage of additional CPUs. The performance gain under high system load is up to 29.7×.

Implementation and evaluation of the effectiveness of dynamic object detection tools for multithreaded and distributed processing of graphical data

Modern monitoring and operational decision-making systems based on image series have become widely used for a wide variety of applications. At the stage of identification of graphic objects, it is established that the found dynamic object belongs to the class of objects of interest based on a comparative analysis of its contours with a given template. The article is the final in a series of articles devoted to theoretical, algorithmic and software components of the video analytics system. The description of the structural components of the video analytics system, the features of the implementation of the dynamic object detection module on video sequences, and the evaluation of the efficiency of the system is presented.

FCPP+Miosix: Scaling Aggregate Programming to Embedded Systems

As the density of nodes capable of sensing, computing and actuation increases, it becomes increasingly useful to model an entire network of physical devices as a single, continuous space-time computing machine. The emergent behaviour of the whole software system is then induced by local computations deployed within each node and by the dynamics of the information diffusion. A relevant example of this distribution model is given by <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">aggregate programming</i> and its minimal set of functional constructs used to manipulate distributed data structures evolving over space and time, and resulting in robustness to changes. In this paper, we propose the first implementation of the aggregate computing paradigm targeting microcontrollers, by integrating FCPP, a C++ implementation of the paradigm, with Miosix, a modern operating system for microcontrollers with full C++ support. To the best of the author's knowledge, we are the first to present results on the effectiveness of FCPP in an embedded operating system setting as opposed to a simulation environment, thus considering tight memory and computational constraints and accounting for packet losses due to nonidealities of the radio channel. We implemented and tested on a network of WandStem nodes two benchmark applications: a network connectivity checker for network planning and preventive maintenance, and a decentralised contact tracing application. Additionally, we show that common problems in sensor networks such as neighbour discovery, construction of a graph of the network topology, coarse grain clock synchronisation as well as network monitoring and the collection of statistics (such as memory occupation data) can be easily performed thanks to the expressive semantics of aggregate programming.

Applying staged event-driven access control to combat ransomware

The advancement of modern Operating Systems (OSs), and the popularity of personal computing devices with Internet connectivity, have facilitated the proliferation of ransomware attacks. Ransomware has evolved from executable programs encrypting user files, to novel attack vectors including fileless command scripts, information exfiltration and human-operated ransomware. Many anti-ransomware studies have been published, but many of them assumed newer ransomware variants only performed file encryption, were similar to existing variants, and often did not consider those novel attack vectors. We have defined an updated ransomware threat model to include those novel attack vectors, and redefined false positives and false negatives in the context of ransomware mitigation. We proposed to apply both program-centric and user-centric access control to combat ransomware, but only delegate access control decisions that users are capable of making to users, while enforcing non-negotiable access control decisions by OS and software developers. We have designed a Staged Event-Driven Access Control (SEDAC) approach to incorporate both program-centric and user-centric access control measures, and demonstrated a prototype on Windows OS. Our prototype was able to intercept more types of ransomware attack vectors than existing proposals. We hope to convince OS and software architects to incorporate our design to better combat ransomware.