Ludwig Nussel

Imaged based systems are considered safer to update as a new image will only be activated via reboot as a whole. Images are rather static though as the OS image is typically delivered by the OS vendor. Package based systems on the other hand are very flexible wrt installed software. However, since packages are typically updated individually at run time, there are non-atomic, intermediate states states that may lead to undefined behavior. This talk presents a hybrid model that behaves similar to an image based system while retaining flexibility of package based systems, building on ideas from SUSE's MicroOS.

Many games separate game logic and engine to allow user modified game play, so called 'mods'. To make such mods portable across CPUs and operating systems Quake 3 allows to compile regular C code to a Quake3 specific byte code. The byte code is then translated to native instructions by the game when loading the mod to achieve near native performance. This talk explains how the virtual machine works and how it's possible that Quake 3 supports both native shared objects as well as byte code VM's.