UEFI BIOS Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

People with some kind of disability face a high level of difficulty for everyday tasks because, in many cases, accessibility was not considered necessary when the task or process was designed. An example of this scenario is a computer's BIOS configuration screens, which do not consider the specific needs, such as screen readers, of visually impaired people. This paper proposes the idea that it is possible to make the pre-operating system environment accessible to visually impaired people. We report our work-in-progress in creating a screen reader prototype, accessing audio cards compatible with the High Definition Audio specification in systems running UEFI compliant firmware.Comment: 6 page

Transparent Replication Using Metaprogramming in Cyan

Replication can be used to increase the availability of a service by creating many operational copies of its data called replicas. Active replication is a form of replication that has strong consistency semantics, easier to reason about and program. However, creating replicated services using active replication still demands from the programmer the knowledge of subtleties of the replication mechanism. In this paper we show how to use the metaprogramming infrastructure of the Cyan language to shield the application programmer from these details, allowing easier creation of fault-tolerant replicated applications through simple annotations.Comment: 8 page

Characterizing Synchronous Writes in Stable Memory Devices

Distributed algorithms that operate in the fail-recovery model rely on the state stored in stable memory to guarantee the irreversibility of operations even in the presence of failures. The performance of these algorithms lean heavily on the performance of stable memory. Current storage technologies have a defined performance profile: data is accessed in blocks of hundreds or thousands of bytes, random access to these blocks is expensive and sequential access is somewhat better. File system implementations hide some of the performance limitations of the underlying storage devices using buffers and caches. However, fail-recovery distributed algorithms bypass some of these techniques and perform synchronous writes to be able to tolerate a failure during the write itself. Assuming the distributed system designer is able to buffer the algorithm's writes, we ask how buffer size and latency complement each other. In this paper we start to answer this question by characterizing the performance (throughput and latency) of typical stable memory devices using a representative set of current file systems.Comment: 14 page