Operating System Functions Research Articles

Comparative analysis of methods for creating virtual three-dimensional models of the lungs from computed tomography images in the practice of a tuberculosis organization using Materialise software

Background. One of the important conditions for the final victory over tuberculosis is not only the prevention of its development and early detection, but also the provision of high-quality personalized medical care to the patient. Additive technologies and virtualization technologies are ways to fully reveal this principle in phthisiatric practice.
 Aim. Demonstrate the possibilities and evaluate the labor costs (time spent on virtualization and the size of the final digital files of models) while working with the Mimics inPrint 2.0.0.159 and Mimics Medical 21.0.0.406 software systems in the aspect of virtual reconstruction of the lungs of a patient with a destructive form of tuberculosis.
 Materials and methods. A comparative analysis of methods for creating virtual three-dimensional models of the lungs from CT images was carried out at the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Clinical Tuberculosis Dispensary. The study involved one patient with a destructive form of tuberculosis of the upper lobe of the left lung. Virtual three-dimensional models were made according to a specially developed algorithm. The time spent for the formation of virtual lung models was analyzed using the built-in function in the "Log" software. The analysis of the size of the obtained virtual lung models in the STL format was carried out using the operating system function from the Windows family "Properties", section "General", subsection "Size".
 Results. The most practical software package for virtual lung reconstructions turned out to be Mimics inPrint 2.0.0.159 with the result of the time spent on creating a model of 2 minutes (Mimics Medical 21.0.0.406 7 minutes 17 seconds) and a model size of 125 megabytes (Mimics Medical 21.0.0.406 26.1 megabyte). The technical nuances and algorithms of lung reconstruction covered in the article using the Mimics inPrint 2.0.0.159 and Mimics Medical 21.0.0.406 software packages will allow the interested person not to make a mistake in realizing their scientific and practical interests in the process of providing personalized care to the patient. The article focuses on the main advantages of the Mimics inPrint 2.0.0.159 software package in comparison with Mimics Medical 21.0.0.406. A brief description of similar programs is given.
 Conclusion. The studied software systems successfully coped with the goal assigned to them, which concerned the demonstration of their capabilities and the assessment of labor costs for virtualization. Mimics inPrint 2.0.0.159 turned out to be the most understandable and promising software and application complex for use in everyday clinical practice.

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

Towards Porting Operating Systems with Program Synthesis

The end of Moore’s Law has ushered in a diversity of hardware not seen in decades. Operating system (OS) (and system software) portability is accordingly becoming increasingly critical. Simultaneously, there has been tremendous progress in program synthesis. We set out to explore the feasibility of using modern program synthesis to generate the machine-dependent parts of an operating system. Our ultimate goal is to generate new ports automatically from descriptions of new machines. One of the issues involved is writing specifications, both for machine-dependent operating system functionality and for instruction set architectures. We designed two domain-specific languages: Alewife for machine-independent specifications of machine-dependent operating system functionality and Cassiopea for describing instruction set architecture semantics. Automated porting also requires an implementation. We developed a toolchain that, given an Alewife specification and a Cassiopea machine description, specializes the machine-independent specification to the target instruction set architecture and synthesizes an implementation in assembly language with a customized symbolic execution engine. Using this approach, we demonstrate the successful synthesis of a total of 140 OS components from two pre-existing OSes for four real hardware platforms. We also developed several optimization methods for OS-related assembly synthesis to improve scalability. The effectiveness of our languages and ability to synthesize code for all 140 specifications is evidence of the feasibility of program synthesis for machine-dependent OS code. However, many research challenges remain; we also discuss the benefits and limitations of our synthesis-based approach to automated OS porting.

A Machine Learning Technique to Detect Malware

Abstract: Organizations have been threatened by malware for a long time, but timely detection of the virus remains a challenge. Malware may quickly damage the system by doing pointless tasks that burden it and prevent it from operating efficiently. There are two ways to detect malware: the traditional method that relies on the malware's signature and the behavior-based approach. The malware's behavior is characterized by the action it conducts when active in the machine, such as executing the operating system functions and downloading infected files from the internet. Based on how it behaves, the suggested algorithm finds the virus. The suggested model in this study is a hybrid of Support Vector Machine and Principle Component Analysis. For real Malware, our suggested model obtained an accuracy of 92.70% during validation, with 96% precision, 96.32% recall, and an f1- score of .96

A Brain Controlled Command-Line Interface to Enhance the Accessibility of Severe Motor Disabled People to Personnel Computer.

There are many applications controlled by the brain signals to bridge the gap in the digital divide between the disabled and the non-disabled people. The deployment of novel assistive technologies using brain-computer interface (BCI) will go a long way toward achieving this lofty goal, especially after the successes demonstrated by these technologies in the daily life of people with severe disabilities. This paper contributes in this direction by proposing an integrated framework to control the operating system functionalities using Electroencephalography signals. Different signal processing algorithms were applied to remove artifacts, extract features, and classify trials. The proposed approach includes different classification algorithms dedicated to detecting the P300 responses efficiently. The predicted commands passed through a socket to the API system, permitting the control of the operating system functionalities. The proposed system outperformed those obtained by the winners of the BCI competition and reached an accuracy average of 94.5% according to the offline approach. The framework was evaluated according to the online process and achieved an excellent accuracy attaining 97% for some users but not less than 90% for others. The suggested framework enhances the information accessibility for people with severe disabilities and helps them perform their daily tasks efficiently. It permits the interaction between the user and personal computers through the brain signals without any muscular efforts.

An Improved Process Supervision and Control Method for Malware Detection

Most modern-day malware detection methods and algorithms are based on prior knowledge of malware specifications. Discovering new malwares by solely relying on computer based automatic solutions with no human intervention currently appears out of reach. Many malwares never decode harmful parts of their code until the triggering of a specific event. Others detect virtual machine or sandbox environments and hide their true nature. Detecting these kinds of malwares-specifically multi evented ones-are nearly impossible for fully automatic detection methods. Previous research found that about 75% of malwares studied did not react in a fully automatic environment without user intervention thus being undetectable. This paper introduces a near automated solution to detect malwares quickly by relying on a supervision and control method based on user level capabilities of the operating system. Improving on previous methods, this research can replace the need for debugging new malwares in almost all aspects. This solution forces malwares in automated environments to activate and be discoverable. Researcher intervention during malware code execution along with the malware’s intent over calling sensitive operating system functions and parameters aid this process. Since operating system functions are virtualized malwares are incapable of physically harming the system during execution. The solution reached 98% overall accuracy in conjunction with reducing code size by 80% in comparison with similar techniques, improving simplicity and reliability.

A microbenchmark characterization of the Emu chick

The Emu Chick is a prototype system designed around the concept of migratory memory-side processing. Rather than transferring large amounts of data across power-hungry, high-latency interconnects, the Emu Chick moves lightweight thread contexts to near-memory cores before the beginning of each memory read. The current prototype hardware uses FPGAs to implement cache-less “Gossamer” cores for computational work and rely on a typical stationary core (PowerPC) to run basic operating system functions and migrate threads between nodes. In this multi-node characterization of the Emu Chick, we extend an earlier single-node investigation [1] of the memory bandwidth characteristics of the system through benchmarks like STREAM, pointer chasing, and sparse matrix-vector multiplication. We compare the Emu Chick hardware to architectural simulation and an Intel Xeon-based platform. Our results demonstrate that for many basic operations the Emu Chick can use available memory bandwidth more efficiently than a more traditional, cache-based architecture although bandwidth usage suffers for computationally intensive workloads like SpMV. Moreover, the Emu Chick provides stable, predictable performance with up to 65% of the peak bandwidth utilization on a random-access pointer chasing benchmark with weak locality.

An Upgraded Smartphone-Based Program for Leisure and Communication of People With Intellectual and Other Disabilities.

Background: People with intellectual disability and sensory or sensory-motor impairments may display serious problems in managing functional daily activities as well as leisure activities and communication with distant partners.Aim: The study assessed an upgraded smartphone-based program to foster independent leisure and communication activity of eight participants with mild to moderate intellectual disability, sensory or sensory-motor impairments, and limited speech skills.Method: The upgraded program was based on the use of (a) a Samsung Galaxy A3 smartphone with Android 6.0 Operating System, near-field communication, music and video player functions, and Macrodroid application, and (b) special radio frequency-code labels. Participants requested leisure and communication activities by placing mini objects or pictures representing those activities and containing frequency-code labels on the smartphone. The smartphone, via the Macrodroid application, read the labels (i.e., discriminated the participants' requests) and provided the participants with the activities requested.Results: During the baseline (i.e., in the absence of the program), the participants failed to request/access leisure and communication activities independently. During the post-intervention phase of the study (i.e., using the program), they succeeded in requesting/accessing those activities independently and spent about 70–90% of their session time busy with those activities.Conclusion: The upgraded smartphone-based program may be highly functional for people like the participants of this study.

Enhanced round robin CPU scheduling with burst time based time quantum

Process scheduling is a very important functionality of Operating system. The main-known process-scheduling algorithms are First Come First Serve (FCFS) algorithm, Round Robin (RR) algorithm, Priority scheduling algorithm and Shortest Job First (SJF) algorithm. Compared to its peers, Round Robin (RR) algorithm has the advantage that it gives fair share of CPU to the processes which are already in the ready-queue. The effectiveness of the RR algorithm greatly depends on chosen time quantum value. Through this research paper, we are proposing an enhanced algorithm called Enhanced Round Robin with Burst-time based Time Quantum (ERRBTQ) process scheduling algorithm which calculates time quantum as per the burst-time of processes already in ready queue. The experimental results and analysis of ERRBTQ algorithm clearly indicates the improved performance when compared with conventional RR and its variants.

What drives our brain? – PFO as a physical being outside our universe –

Local functions of the brain can be complemented by other parts by training, even if they were lost by an accident such as external injury and internal bleeding. This is the dynamical redistribution of functions inside the brain. It can be regarded as a result of the Operating System (OS) function of the brain, on the analogy of computers. On the other hand, the passive consciousness hypothesis is known to be a powerful cognitive model in the sense that it figures out the difficult problems concerning consciousness such as the frame problem, binding problem, etc. Intrinsic problem of the model, however, lies in the dubious mechanism by which collective opinions are decided by “majority vote” in the unconscious system and are collected to the local conscious system in a bottom-up manner. No one has elucidated, so far, how the unconscious system and the conscious one are connected in the neural network. The Parasite Fermion Model is a physical model that solves those problems. The Model asserts that, only by assuming the multi-dimensional universe that is nowadays commonly discussed in the modern physics and two types of fermions (material particles), there exists the materialistic subject, called Parasite Fermion Object (PFO), in the extra-dimensional space. One can avoid above-mentioned difficulties, by assuming that the PFO plays a significant role in the OS function and decision process of the unconscious system.

Omni-Kernel: An Operating System Architecture for Pervasive Monitoring and Scheduling

The omni-kernel architecture is designed around pervasive monitoring and scheduling. Motivated by new requirements in virtualized environments, this architecture ensures that all resource consumption is measured, that resource consumption resulting from a scheduling decision is attributable to an activity, and that scheduling decisions are fine-grained. Vortex , implemented for multi-core x86-64 platforms, instantiates the omni-kernel architecture, providing a wide range of operating system functionality and abstractions. With Vortex, we experimentally demonstrated the efficacy of the omni-kernel architecture to provide accurate scheduler control over resource allocation despite competing workloads. Experiments involving Apache, MySQL, and Hadoop quantify the cost of pervasive monitoring and scheduling in Vortex to be below $6$ percent of cpu consumption.

AN IMPROVED APPROACH TO MINIMIZE CONTEXT SWITCHING IN ROUND ROBIN SCHEDULING ALGORITHM USING OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Scheduling is a fundamental operating system function. Almost all computer resources are scheduled before use. All major CPU scheduling algorithms concentrates more on to maximize CPU utilization, throughput, waiting time and turnaround time. In particularly, the performance of round robin algorithm depends heavily on the size of the time quantum. To improve the performance of CPU and to minimize the overhead on the CPU, time quantum should be large with respect to the context switch time. Otherwise, context switching will be more. In this research paper, we propose a method to minimize the context switching and to break the fixed time quantum size in round robin scheduling algorithm using optimization techniques. Both results and calculations show that, our proposed method is more efficient than the existing round robin scheduling algorithm.

Effect of customer demand and competitive strategy on decision-making of manufacturing system functional objectives

Purpose: To ascertain the relationship between the operation system function goal decision making and customer demand and competition strategy, can better discover and integrate all available resources (including important capital resources) to achieve business opportunities, the establishment of sustainable competitive ability. Because, to achieve business development lead policymakers take great uncertainty, which led to the investment behavior required for the operational activities of resources also bear the enormous risks. Design/methodology/approach : Through principal component analysis on the data collected by questionnaires, the manuscript obtains dominant factors for customer demand, competitive strategy and manufacturing system functional objectives respectively. By these factors, it tests its three hypotheses with the data from northeast of China and draws some conclusions. Findings : The results show that customer demand have a significant positive effect on competitive strategy; competitive strategy have positive influence on manufacturing system functional objectives; customer demand affect the functional objectives, by competitive strategy. Research limitations/implications : In this research, competitive strategy and manufacturing system functional objectives are influenced by customer demand. The conclusion of the research can provide theoretical guidance for Chinese enterprises which carry out manufacturing system functional objectives. Originality/value: In this research, a new measure questionnaire of competition strategy, customer satisfaction and operating system function goal was used, analyzed the influence factors of time, quality, cost, efficiency, service and environment, on the operation of the system. The study shows that the effect of competition strategy and customer demand has a direct impact on the operating system functions, customer demand through competitive strategy of indirect effects operating system functions.

Interactive visualization tools for the structural biologist

In structural biology, management of a large number of Protein Data Bank (PDB) files and raw X-ray diffraction images often presents a major organizational problem. Existing software packages that manipulate these file types were not designed for these kinds of file-management tasks. This is typically encountered when browsing through a folder of hundreds of X-ray images, with the aim of rapidly inspecting the diffraction quality of a data set. To solve this problem, a useful functionality of the Macintosh operating system (OSX) has been exploited that allows custom visualization plugins to be attached to certain file types. Software plugins have been developed for diffraction images and PDB files, which in many scenarios can save considerable time and effort. The direct visualization of diffraction images and PDB structures in the file browser can be used to identify key files of interest simply by scrolling through a list of files.

SmartK: Smart cards in operating systems at kernel level

A smart card is a tamper-resistant miniature computer that performs some basic computations on input a secret information. So far, smart cards have been widely used for securing many digital transactions (e.g., pay television, ATM machines).We focus on the implementation of operating system security services leveraging on smart cards. This very challenging feature allows one to personalize some functionalities of the operating system by simply changing a smart card. Current solutions for integrating smart card features in operating system services require at least a partial execution of some of the operating system functionalities at “user level”. Unfortunately, system functionalities built on top of components lying at both kernel and user levels may negatively affect the overall system security, due to the introduction of multiple points of failure.In this work, we present the design and implementation of SmartK: a framework that integrates features of smart cards uniquely in the Linux kernel. In order to validate our approach, we propose a host of enhancements to the Linux operating system built on top of SmartK: 1) in-kernel clients' authentication with Kerberos; 2) execution of trusted code; 3) key management in secure network filesystems.In particular, we present an experimental Linux OS distribution (SalSA), which addresses the security issues related to downloading packages and to updating an operating system through the Internet.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT OF REAL-TIME MULTITASKING MICROKERNEL BASED ON ARM7TDMI FOR INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

A real-time microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement a real-time operating system. Real-time systems are those systems whose response is deterministic in time. In our research a 32-task Real Time Microkernel is designed using which multi tasking can be done on the targeted processor ARM7TDMI. Two sets of functions are developed in this research work. First one is Operating System functions and second is application functions. Operating System functions are mainly for carrying out task creation, multi-tasking, scheduling, context switching and Inter task communication. The process of scheduling and switching the CPU (Central Processing Unit) between several tasks is illustrated in this paper. The number of application functions can vary between 1 to 32. Each of these application functions is created as a task by the microkernel and scheduled by the pre-emptive priority scheduler. Multi tasking of these application tasks is demonstrated in this paper.

Syslog a Promising Solution to Log Management

Log data are very useful in the changing scenario as it contains information related to types of events/attacks occurring within an organizations network. Log data are also very useful to track the history of an intruder’s activity in day-to-day work and providing evidence to investigate malicious activity. Hence log files, which are most significant for cyber security investigation, should be stored in a secured place so that intruders will not be able to alter or erase log files. In order to protect the log data from breaches of their confidentiality and integrity log management is required in almost all enterprises. Windows event log has too many limitations, which becomes the biggest challenge in the process of log management. One of the limitations of windows event log is that, it is incapable of handling of messages from network devices such as routers and switches. Also there are no native window tools available to facilitate the centralization of logging process from different log sources in an organization where as Syslog offers very efficient solution to centralize the logging function. The proposed solution strongly recommends using syslog for the log management process. The proposed architectural model is very efficient to capture log data from anywhere in an organizations networks. The solution proposed here greatly simplifies the process of log storage and analysis by centralizing the logging process from all the devices present in the network and also provide a secured storage for the log data. The proposed model also makes it possible for Windows event log to be compatible with the logging function of other operating system. Keywords: Syslog, Audit logs, Cyber security, Windows Event logs, Log management.

Energy Efficiency of a Multi-Core Processor by Tag Reduction

We consider the energy saving problem for caches on a multi-core processor. In the previous research on low power processors, there are various methods to reduce power dissipation. Tag reduction is one of them. This paper extends the tag reduction technique on a single-core processor to a multi-core processor and investigates the potential of energy saving for multi-core processors. We formulate our approach as an equivalent problem which is to find an assignment of the whole instruction pages in the physical memory to a set of cores such that the tag-reduction conflicts for each core can be mostly avoided or reduced. We then propose three algorithms using different heuristics for this assignment problem. We provide convincing experimental results by collecting experimental data from a real operating system instead of the traditional way using a processor simulator that cannot simulate operating system functions and the full memory hierarchy. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can save total energy up to 83.93% on an 8-core processor and 76.16% on a 4-core processor in average compared to the one that the tag-reduction is not used for. They also significantly outperform the tag reduction based algorithm on a single-core processor.

Computational and Energy Costs of Cryptographic Algorithms on Handheld Devices

Networks are evolving toward a ubiquitous model in which heterogeneous devices are interconnected. Cryptographic algorithms are required for developing security solutions that protect network activity. However, the computational and energy limitations of network devices jeopardize the actual implementation of such mechanisms. In this paper, we perform a wide analysis on the expenses of launching symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, hash chain functions, elliptic curves cryptography and pairing based cryptography on personal agendas, and compare them with the costs of basic operating system functions. Results show that although cryptographic power costs are high and such operations shall be restricted in time, they are not the main limiting factor of the autonomy of a device.

A web-based remote radiation treatment planning system using the remote desktop function of a computer operating system: a preliminary report

We developed a web-based, remote radiation treatment planning system which allowed staff at an affiliated hospital to obtain support from a fully staffed central institution. Network security was based on a firewall and a virtual private network (VPN). Client computers were installed at a cancer centre, at a university hospital and at a staff home. We remotely operated the treatment planning computer using the Remote Desktop function built in to the Windows operating system. Except for the initial setup of the VPN router, no special knowledge was needed to operate the remote radiation treatment planning system. There was a time lag that seemed to depend on the volume of data traffic on the Internet, but it did not affect smooth operation. The initial cost and running cost of the system were reasonable.