Donald E. Porter

Research

Current Projects

My research develops better abstractions for managing concurrency and security, primarily in the operating system, and extending these abstractions to other portions of the technology stack as appropriate. Current projects include a transaction abstraction for the system call API in Linux in a system called TxOS. System transactions provide a simple interface by which applications can manage concurrency and consistency for OS-managed resources.

Projects

TxOS - Adding transactions to the system call API.
Laminar - Practical, fine-grained decentralized information flow control (DIFC) support in both the JVM and Linux kernel.
Syncchar - Analyzing and tuning the performance of transactional memory workloads.
MetaTM/TxLinux - Using hardware transactional memory in the OS kernel.

Publications

(Presented in reverse chronological order, horizonal lines separate years).

Virtualize Storage, Not Disks
William Jannen, Chia-Che Tsai, and Donald E. Porter
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '13), Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, May 2013.

Improving Server Applications with System Transactions
Sangman Kim, Michael Z. Lee, Alan M. Dunn, Owen S. Hofmann, Xuan Wang, Emmett Witchel, Donald E. Porter
(PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 7th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '12), Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.

TxBox: Building Secure, Efficient Sandboxes with System Transactions
Suman Jana, Donald E. Porter, and Vitaly Shmatikov
(PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland '11), Oakland, CA, May 2011.
Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down
Donald E. Porter, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Jon Howell, Reuben Olinsky, and Galen Hunt
(PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '11), Newport Beach, CA, March 2011.

Operating System Transactions
Donald E. Porter
(PDF)
Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, December 2010.
Transactional System Calls on Linux
Donald E. Porter and Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 2010 Linux Symposium, Ottawa, Canada, July 2010.
Understanding Transactional Memory Performance
Donald E. Porter and Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS '10), White Plains, NY, March 2010.

Operating System Transactions
Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Christopher J Rossbach Alexander Benn Emmett Witchel
(PDF, Poster PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '09), Big Sky, MT, October 2009.
Laminar: Practical Fine-Grained Decentralized Information Flow Control
Indrajit Roy, Donald E. Porter, Michael D. Bond Kathryn S. McKinley Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation (PLDI '09), Dublin, Ireland, June 2009.
Operating Systems Should Provide Transactions
Donald E. Porter, Emmett Witchel
(PDF, HTML)
In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '09), Monte Verita, Switzerland, May 2009.

Privacy-Preserving Remote Diagnostics
Justin Brickell, Donald E. Porter, Vitaly Shmatikov, Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '07), Alexandria, VA October 2007.
TxLinux: Using and Managing Transactional Memory in an Operating System
Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. Porter, Hany E. Ramadan, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '07) , Stevenson, WA October 2007.
Audience Choice Award.
A version of this paper also appeared in the September 2008 Issue of Communications of the ACM.
Solving Difficult HTM Problems Without Difficult Hardware
Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. Porter, Christopher J. Rossbach, Hany E. Ramadan, Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT '07) , Portland, OR August 2007.
MetaTM/TxLinux: Transactional Memory For An Operating System
Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach, Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Aditya Bhandari, Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '07), San Diego, CA June 2007.
A version of this paper also appeared in the 2007 IEEE/Micro Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences of 2007.
Improved Error Reporting for Software that Uses Black Box Components
Jungwoo Ha, Christopher J. Rossbach, Jason V. Davis, Indrajit Roy, Hany E. Ramadan, Donald E. Porter, David L. Chen, Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '07), San Diego, CA June 2007.
Is the Optimism in Optimistic Concurrency Warranted?
Donald E. Porter, Owen S. Hofmann, Emmett Witchel
(PDF, HTML)
In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '07) San Diego, CA, May 2007.

Using Java to teach networking concepts with a programmable network sniffer
Michael J. Jipping, Agata Bugaj, Lilyana Mihalkova, and Donald E. Porter
(PDF)
In Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Reno, Nevada, February 2003.

Posters

Modeling Transactional Memory Workload Performance
Donald E. Porter and Emmett Witchel
(Summary PDF, Poster PDF)
In the Proceedings of the 15th ACM Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP '10), Bangalore, India, January 2010.
Operating System Transactions
Donald E. Porter, Indrajit Roy, and Emmett Witchel
(PDF)
Appeared at the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '08), San Diego, CA, December 2008.

Technical Reports and other non-reviewed publications

Living Dangerously: A Survey of Software Download Practices
Jon Howell, Galen Hunt, David Molnar, and Donald E. Porter.
(PDF)
Microsoft Research Technical Report, Number MSR-TR-2010-51.