First, I would like to thank my supervisors, Allan Borodin and Angela
Demke~Brown, for helping me get past playing around the code and get to write
my ideas in the form of this thesis.
%More particularly, to Allan for bearing with me during my long trip across
%the areas in the computer science department, and to Angela

I wish to thank S\o ren Sandmann and Lorenzo Colitti for useful discussion,
and sharing their measurements and tools with me.

I also want to thank Bert Hubert for readily sharing his work with me prior to
publication, and Rik van Riel for answering all my technical questions
promptly.

I would like to thank all my colleagues in the Systems Software Reading Group
for introducing me to recent research in the systems software area, for
thought provoking discussions, and for providing useful feedback during the
early days of my work.

During the course of this project, I solicited advice from many, many
colleagues here at the University of Toronto, all of whom have helped me
very generously.  In particular I would like to thank Shiva Nejati, Mehrdad
Sabetzadeh, Reza Azimi, and Faye Baron.

Finally, I would like to thank Google and the Fedora Project, for partially
supporting my work through the Summer of Code program.