Gilles Muller Senior Research Scientist, INRIA REGAL Gilles.Muller@lip6.fr tel: +33 1 44 27 88 52 LIP6 Boîte courrier 169 4 place Jussieu 75252 Paris Cedex 05 Open PhD position on JVM optimization

Former vice-chair of ACM/SIGOPS, July 2003 -June 2007.

Current research activities: Design of Operating Systems, using domain-specific languages

The development of operating systems is traditionally considered to be an activity on the fringe of software development. In fact, the lack of systematic methodologies for OS design often translates into closed systems that are difficult to extend and modify. Too often generality is sacrificed for performance. The widespread use of unsafe programming languages, combined with extensive manual optimizations, compromises the safety of OS software.

The goal of my research is to develop new methodologies based on the use of aspect-oriented programming and domain-specific languages for the structuring of an OS and an OS kernel. Aspect-oriented programming is a technique for specifying behaviors (or strategies) independently of the target system; a "weaver" automatically integrates the code of such an aspect into the relevant system components. This approach separates strategies, which are programmed using aspects, from the underlying mechanisms, and thus simplifies system evolution and extension.

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a programming language dedicated to a particular application domain. A DSL is more restricted than a general-purpose language, such as Java or C, but encapsulates domain expertise that can allow verification of important safety properties. In the context of systems programming, DSLs have been developed for active networks (PLAN-P, and CPLAN-P), and device drivers (Devil).

In the context of aspect-oriented programming, we have proposed to use DSLs to program new aspects. This approach facilitates the safe programming of new strategies. The combination of aspect-oriented programming and domain-specific languages has been partially validated in the context of Bossa, a DSL for the design of kernel schedulers.

My latest work is a DSL-based approach to address the problem of collateral evolutions in drivers, that are are evolutions in device-specific code induced by a change in a support library. Specifically, we are developing a development environment, Coccinelle, that provides a transformation language for precisely expressing evolutions and an interactive transformation tool for applying them. The key idea of Coccinelle is to shift the burden of collateral evolution from the driver maintainer to the OS developer who performs the original library evolution, and who thus understands this evolution best. Overall, Coccinelle will provide a means for formally documenting collateral evolutions and for easing the application of these evolutions to device-specific code.

Selected Publications

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Recent Professional Activities (2007-...)

• DSN 2012, June 2012, Boston, USA.
  Poster Chair


• ICDCS 2012, June 2012, Macau, China.
  Distributed OS and Middleware track co-chair


• PLOS 2011, October 2011, Portugal.
  PC member, Co-organizer


• SRDS 2011, October 2011, Madrid, Spain.
  PC member


• SYSTOR 2011, May 2011, Haifa, Israel.
  PC member


• HotDep 2010, October 2010, Vancouver, Canada.
  PC member


• DSN-DCCS 2010, June 2010, Chicago, USA.
  PC member


• 5th EuroSys conference, April 2010, Paris.
  PC chair


• 5th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2009), October 2009, Big Sky, Montana, USA.
  PC chair


• 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2009), November 2009, Lyon.
  PC member, multicore track


• 7th French Conference on Operating Systems (CFSE-7), September 2009, Toulouse.
  PC member


• IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  PC member


• EuroSys 2009 PhD prize, April 2009, Nuremberg, Germany.
  Jury member


• 8th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software (ACP4IS '09), March 2009, Charlotteswille, Virginia.
  PC member


• 11th IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, December 2008, Nanjing, China.
  PC member


• IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2008), September 2008, Beijing, China.
  PC member


• 2008 DSN/Performance and Dependability Symposium (PDS), June 2008, Anchorage, Alaska.
  PC member


• Seventh European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-7) , May 2008, Kaunas, Lithuania.
  PC member


• 2nd EuroSys Doctoral Workshop, April 2008, Glasgow, Scotland.
  PC member


• 7th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software (ACP4IS '08), March 2008, Brussels, Belgium.
  PC member


• EuroSys 2008 PhD prize, April 2008, Glasgow, Scotland.
  Jury member


• 6th French Conference on Operating Systems (CFSE-6), March 2008, Fribourg, Switzerland.
  PC member


• Thirteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '08), March 2008, Seattle, USA.
  PC member


• 10th IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, November 2007, Dallas, Texas, USA.
  PC member


• 4th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2007), October 2007, Stevenson, Washington, USA.
  PC member


• IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2007), July 2007, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
  PC member


• DSN-DCCS 2007, June 2007, Edinburgh, UK.
  PC member


• ICDCS 2007, June 2007, Toronto, CA.
  PC member


• 10th IEEE International Symposium on Object and component-oriented Real-time distributed (ISORC 2007), May 2007, Santorini Island, Greece.
  PC member


• EuroSys 2007 PhD prize, March 2007, Lisbon, Portugal.
  Jury member


• EuroSys 2007, March 2007, Lisbon, Portugal.
  PC member

Past activities while part of the Compose group