Evan B. '10
Apr 23 2008
Live Kernel Patching System
Posted in: Academics & Research
This is partially a plug for a friend of mine, but it's also a really cool system that I think some of you might like.
Ksplice is system for automatically patching a Linux kernel without reboots. Jeff Arnold '07, MEng '08 developed this as his master's thesis, and today released the system to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).
Ksplice requires nothing more than the currently running kernel source and the configuration settings, combined with a patch to the source code, to generate a kernel module which, when loaded, can be used to immediately patch vulnerabilities or introduce new behavior. As a maintainer of linux.mit.edu, the SIPB Linux dialup server, Jeff has in the past used Ksplice to keep this server up, which many people on campus rely on.
This really has the potential to revolutionize systems administration for high-reliability systems. But...don't take it from me. Take it from Ted Ts'o '90. Ted is an active kernel hacker who, among other things, developed the ext2... read the post »
Mar 17 2008
The Zone Cell Challenge
Posted in: Life & Culture
There are lots of things I should have been doing this weekend. There's the 8 page draft paper that was due today. Or the 6.004 lab where I have to program a Turing machine - it's due Thursday. Or the revision of my design project which is due on Thursday (I actually still don't know what design I'm going to write up). Or either of the psets in my other two classes which are both due on Friday.
Yes, the weeks before Spring Break tend to suck. Like, not just your average suck. They tend to really suck. And with that much suck, I should have spent all weekend tooling and doing nothing else.
But of course that's never how it works.
Last weekend, I took the Zone Cell Challenge.
Now, this is going to require a little background. Actually, there's quite a bit of background. Back In The Day, the MIT I/S Department (now IS&T) hired student developers to basically help build Athena. They were called the Watchmakers, based on a book by Niven & Pournell (there's a page that explains the... read the post »
Feb 27 2008
The Impossible Design Project
Posted in: Academics & Research
Ok. Well, I've been kind of busy these days. Taking 5 classes (2 CIs and 2 labs will do that). So...I thought I'd take the easy way out, by giving you one of my problems to take a look at.
6.033 is Computer Systems Engineering. It has lots of different components to it - so far we've talked about the Therac-25, the X Windows System, multi-threading, and a couple of other things. It moves quickly through different topics, all of which are very interesting.
In particular, though, 6.033 has two design projects, where we're presented with a fairly real world problem, and we have to try to solve it. This year, we have to create a controller for a NAND flash device.
The controller sits between the filesystem and the physical device itself, and has to make the flash look like a traditional magnetic disk, in spite of the fact that flash memory is distinctly unlike a magnetic disk.
Here's the description of the problem: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/dp1/.
Feel free to submit solutions in... read the post »
Feb 15 2008
Keep Holy the Month of IAP For It Is a Time of Rest
Posted in: Academics & Research
(title taken from The Cathedral of Our Lady of the All-Night Tool)
I keep a list in my head of what topics I want to blog about. But I think of it as a stack, as opposed to a queue - so I cover things that happened more recently first.
So obviously, I need to cover what I did over IAP, and then maybe I can make it as far back as last semester.
Fortunately for me (and those of you who want to hear about 6.111 and my other adventures in EE), I didn't do much this IAP, so I should be able to just knock this out and move on. Last IAP I spent almost all of the month working on 6.270. It was fun - the robots are really cool. But it was also stresful. I didn't get much sleep during the last week of IAP (or during the rest of IAP, for that matter).
So I decided that this year I was going to be on campus, but not have any formalized activities taking up all of IAP. I was going to rest and recuperate so that I could go into the spring term well rested and just generally enjoy myself.
I... read the post »
Feb 7 2008
More Psets!
Posted in: Academics & Research
I woke up this morning at 8:15, 45 minutes after my alarm was going to go off. I go and look at my computer (which is supposed to be my alarm clock) to find that the power adapter askew enough that my laptop's battery had completely drained. I wait 20 minutes for the shower, and then trudge through the rain to Sunny's, the greatest breakfast joint in Cambridge, to meet some friends for breakfast...only to run into them walking to campus on my way there.
And thus began the second of the dreariest, grayest, rainiest first two days of school I can remember.
Fortunately, I was intentionally getting up well before my classes started and the breakfast was tasty, so it all works out in the end.
Anyway! Enough of that. I think of my "list of potential blog entries" as a stack, not a queue - I do the most recent things first. So today I'm exploiting that property to put off writing about last semester even longer in favor of the classic what-classes-am-I-taking-this-term post.
I'm signed... read the post »