S03 E16
12 Jun 2023/01:05:38

Virtualizing Time


Jordan Hendricks joined Bryan and Adam to talk about her work virtualizing time--particularly challenging when migrating virtual machines from one physical machine to another!

We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from June 12th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague Jordan Hendricks.

The (lightly edited) live chat from the show:

 *  Starting in about 1994, chip architectures began specifying high resolution
 *  timestamp registers.  As of this writing (1999), all major chip families
 *  (UltraSPARC, PentiumPro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha) have high resolution
 *  timestamp registers, and two (UltraSPARC and MIPS) have added the capacity
 *  to interrupt based on timestamp values.  These timestamp-compare registers
 *  present a time-based interrupt source which can be reprogrammed arbitrarily
 *  often without introducing error.  Given the low cost of implementing such a
 *  timestamp-compare register (and the tangible benefit of eliminating
 *  discrete timer parts), it is reasonable to expect that future chip
 *  architectures will adopt this feature.



  • aka_pugs: Bryan's TSC is overflowing.
  • DanCrossNYC: That's Tom.
  • DanCrossNYC: Riding in with the cavalry.
  • aka_pugs: Good session.
  • ahl: Thanks Jordan and everyone who joined us live; we'll make this chat read-only in just a few minutes
  • bcantrill: Yes, thank you Jordan
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!