Dawson Engler

Hi.

I used to have a fetish involving oil, stages, and weights (since outgrown). This picture is from the 1991 Jr. California, a "drug-free-for-life" competition, where I finished 2nd. A reliance on the body's natural supply of androgenic aids combined with over-exuberant dieting translated into muscles only slightly larger than those of an olympic marathon runner.

Cool computer-related people and places.

Some Recent Papers

Exokernel Papers

• Application Performance and Flexibility on Exokernel Systems,
  M. Frans Kaashoek, Dawson R. Engler, Gregory R. Ganger, H'ector M. Brice~no, Russell Hunt, David Mazi`eres, Thomas Pinckney, Robert Grimm, John Jannotti, and Kenneth Mackenzie, Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). October, 1997.
  
  This is the best exokernel paper ever written. It has real application performance and a cool use of deterministic turing machines that lets an exokernel trust applications to track what they own without understanding how they do so. Slides are available here.
  
  
• Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management,
  Dawson R. Engler, M. Frans Kaashoek and James W. O'Toole
  
  This paper appeared in SOSP95 ( slides are available here). It is the most detailed description of what an exokernel is and has the most recent numbers. It is also rather dense. A more long-winded version of this paper is available in the form of my masters thesis (though the material is about 6 months behind that in the SOSP paper).
  
  
• Exterminate All Operating System Abstractions,
  Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek
  This is a flamy paper describing the philosophical underpinnings of the exokernel approach. It appeared in HotOS-V
  
• Server Operating Systems,
  by M. Frans Kaashoek, Dawson R. Engler, Gregory R. Ganger, and Deborah A. Wallach.
  This paper appears in the 1996 SIGOPS European Workshop, September 9-11, 1996.
  

  The following position papers give a somewhat dated overview of the exokernel project; we are currently implementing a prototype exokernel called Aegis.
  
  

• AVM: Application-level Virtual Memory,
  Dawson R. Engler, Sandeep Gupta and M. Frans Kaashoek
  This paper gives a brief motivation for and description of application-level virtual memory. It appeared in HotOS-V
  
• The Exokernel Approach to Operating System Extensibility,
  Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek and James W. O'Toole Jr.
  This 1-page precis of the exokernel project appeared in the Proceedings of First Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI)
  
• The Operating System Kernel as a Secure Programmable Machine,
  Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek and James W. O'Toole Jr.
  This is a later version of a position paper that appears in the Proceedings of the Sixth SIGOPS European Workshop, 1994. This version appears in the OSR Special Issue on Extensible Operating Systems. (The exokernel philosophy it presents is somewhat out-of-date.)
  
  

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Incorporating application semantics and control into compilation

Magik is a system developed to incorporate application semantics (such as the meaning of library interfaces and data structures) into the compiler, thereby allowing it to both optimize and error check them to the same degree as language constructs. Magik also allows programmers to easily add extensions to the compiler. Since these extensions have full access to the symbol table, the compiler IR, and data flow information they can perform operations (such as structure member profiling) expensive or infeasible by other means. For an abstract, click here; the full paper (which appeared in the First Conference on Domain-specific Languages) is here.

vcode: fast portable dynamic code generation

• vcode: a retargetable, extensible, very fast dynamic code generation system,
  by Dawson R. Engler
  This paper appeared in PLDI '96. Slides are available here .
  
  vcode is a portable system to generate executable code at runtime. It generates code in approximately 10 instructions per generated instruction, and is easily extendable by clients. A tutorial describing it can be obtained by clicking here. A beta version of the system is also available. To get on the vcode mailing list, please email engler@lcs.mit.edu.
  
  Click here for a bit more information.
  
  

`C: a language for high-level, fast dynamic code generation

• `C: A Language for High-Level, Efficient, and Machine-independent
  Dynamic Code Generation,
  by Dawson R. Engler, Wilson C. Hsieh and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  This paper appeared in POPL 1996. Slides are available here.
  
• tcc: A System for Fast, Flexible, and High-level Dynamic Code Generation
  by Massimiliano Poletto, Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  This paper will appear in PLDI 1997. A preliminary release of the tcc compiler can be obtained from the tickc homepage.
• tcc: A Template-Based Compiler for `C
  by Massimiliano Poletto, Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  This paper appeared in WCSSS 1996. A preliminary release of the tcc compiler can be obtained from the tickc homepage.

DCG

• DCG: An Efficient, Retargetable Dynamic Code Generator,
  by Dawson R. Engler and Todd A. Proebsting.
  This paper appeared in ASPLOS 94 ( click here for slides). The system it describes has been superseded by vcode.
  

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• ASHs: Application-specific handlers for high-performance messaging,
  by Deborah A. Wallach, Dawson R. Engler, and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  The paper appeared in ACM Communication Architectures, Protocols, and Applications (SIGCOMM '96). Portions of its implementation are more thoroughly explored in:
  
• Design and Implementation of a Modular, Flexible, and Fast System for Dynamic Protocol Composition, by Dawson R. Engler, Deborah A. Wallach, and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  
  
• DPF: Fast, Flexible Message Demultiplexing using Dynamic Code Generation,
  by Dawson R. Engler and M. Frans Kaashoek.
  The paper appeared in ACM Communication Architectures, Protocols, and Applications (SIGCOMM '96). Slides from the talk are available here. A beta release of the system is available here.
  DPF is described more fully here.
  

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• The Design and Implementation of Efficient Thread-Based Parallelism,
  by Dawson R. Engler.
  
• Filaments: Efficient Support for Fine-Grain Parallelism,
  by Dawson R. Engler, Gregory R. Andrews, and David K. Lowenthal.
  
  engler@lcs.mit.edu