The operating system kernel provides the most critical services to your computer, has the most responsibility of any software on your machine, runs at the highest privilege level on your CPU … and is by far the most fun part of your system to gratuitously modify for no good reason. Join us as we take a look at the Linux kernel (mainly) and all the crazy things we can make it do to our poor, innocent, unsuspecting userspace applications. Along the way we might run across some actually useful ideas.
You are encouraged to bring your laptop. If you want to try out some of these ideas, you can borrow an Ubuntu live CD or create a virtual machine at XVM — if you're not brave enough to test them on your own Linux computer!
Geoffrey Thomas <geofft>
Friday, January 23, 2009
3:00 to 5:00 pm, room 4-231
Prior familiarity with some UNIX-like system, as well as some programming experience, is assumed; something like 6.033 will probably be helpful, as will knowledge of C.
(will be posted after the talk)