Recent Trends in Operating Systems and their Applicability to

2006

K42 is one of the few recent research projects that is examining operating system design structure issues in the context of new whole-system design. K42 is open source and was designed from the ground up to perform well and to be scalable, customizable, and maintainable. The project was begun in 1996 by a team at IBM Research. Over the last nine years there has been a development effort on K42 from between six to twenty researchers and developers across IBM, collaborating universities, and national laboratories. K42 supports the Linux API and ABI, and is able to run unmodified Linux applications and libraries. The approach we took in K42 to achieve scalability and customizability has been successful.

2009

Running untrusted user-level code inside an operating system kernel has been studied in the 1990's but has not really caught on. We believe the time has come to resurrect kernel extensions for operating systems that run on highly-parallel clusters and supercomputers. The reason is that the usage model for these machines differs significantly from a desktop machine or a server. In addition, vendors are starting to add features, such as floating-point accelerators, multicore processors, and reconfigurable compute elements. An operating system for such machines must be adaptable to the requirements of specific applications and provide abstractions to access next-generation hardware features, without sacrificing performance or scalability.

2009

Palacios and Kitten are new open source tools that enable applications, whether ported or not, to achieve scalable high performance on large machines. They provide a thin layer over the hardware to support both full-featured virtualized environments and native codebases. Kitten is an OS under development at Sandia that implements a lightweight kernel architecture to provide predictable behavior and increased flexibility on large machines, while also providing Linux binary compatibility. Palacios is a VMM that is under development at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico. Palacios, which can be embedded into Kitten and other OSes, supports existing, unmodified applications and operating systems by using virtualization that leverages hardware technologies. We describe the design and implementation of both Kitten and Palacios. Our benchmarks show that they provide near native, scalable performance. Palacios and Kitten provide an incremental path to using supercomputer resources that is not performance-compromised.

IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, 2020

Multikernel Operating Systems (OSs) were introduced to cope with challenges in software development and deployment in lightweight manycores. Among the possible structures for a multikernel OS, we focus on designs based on asymmetric kernels. This design delivers better performance isolation, but it suffers from an overhead in energy efficiency. In this work, we overcome this issue with a co-design solution between the cluster of a lightweight manycore and an asymmetric kernel. We designed a 4-core heterogeneous cluster with one core tuned for the OS kernel and we patched the OS kernel to better match the characteristics of this core. Our experiments unveiled that our solution consumes 14.1% less power than the baseline and also improves the OS kernel performance by up to 6.5%.

2019 IX Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering (SBESC), 2019

Multikernel operating systems (OSs) were introduced to match the architectural characteristics of lightweight manycores. While several multikernel OS designs are possible, in this work we argue on one that is structured in asymmetric microkernel instances. We deliver an open-source implementation of an OS kernel with these characteristics, and we provide a comprehensive assessment using a representative benchmark suite. Our results show that an asymmetric microkernel design is scalable and introduces at most 0.9% of performance interference in an application execution. Also, our results unveil co-design aspects between an OS kernel and the architecture of lightweight manycore, concerning the memory system and core grouping.

1996

We describe a set of efficient cross-domain mechanisms that allow operating systems to be implemented as cooperating applications, eliminating the need for a monolithic kernel. Our implementation, called SPACE[1, 2], can achieve higher-performance than kernel-based systems by allowing applications to build customized system services and tailor system interfaces for performance. On the SPARC architecture we have measured minimal application-to-application system service calls that are 5 times faster than Solaris getpid(), and customized thread creation that is 50 times faster than minimal Solaris threads.

2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering, 2015

Future exascale systems will impose several conflicting challenges on the operating system (OS) running on the compute nodes of such machines. On the one hand, the targeted extreme scale requires the kind of high resource usage efficiency that is best provided by lightweight OSes. At the same time, substantial changes in hardware are expected for exascale systems. Compute nodes are expected to host a mix of general-purpose and special-purpose processors or accelerators tailored for serial, parallel, compute-intensive, or I/O-intensive workloads. Similarly, the deeper and more complex memory hierarchy will expose multiple coherence domains and NUMA nodes in addition to incorporating nonvolatile RAM. That expected workload and hardware heterogeneity and complexity is not compatible with the simplicity that characterizes high performance lightweight kernels. In this work, we describe the Argo Exascale node OS, which is our approach to providing in a single kernel the required OS environments for the two aforementioned conflicting goals. We resort to multiple OS specializations on top of a single Linux kernel coupled with multiple containers.

2018

Modern mobile devices have numerous ephemeral tasks. These tasks are driven by background activities, such as push notifications and sensor readings. In order to execute these tasks, the whole platform has to periodically wake up beforehand, and go to sleep afterwards. During this process, the OS kernel operates on power state of various IO devices, which has been identified as the bottleneck for energy efficiency. To this end, we want to offload this kernel phase to a more energy efficient, microcontroller level core, named peripheral core. To execute commodity OS on a peripheral core, existing approaches either require much engineering effort or incur high execution cost. Therefore, we proposed a new OS model called transkernel. By utilizing cross-ISA dynamic binary translation (DBT) technique, transkernel creates a virtualized environment on the peripheral core. It relies on a small set of stable interfaces. It is specialized for frequently executed kernel path. It exploits ISA s...

2008

Although they allow easy and cost-effective use of a wide range of machines, the programming interface and behavior of general-purpose Operating Systems (OS) often fail to meet, or even conflict with, the specific desires of High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications, such as low preemption or control over memory and I/O management. That often leads to poor performance. On the other hand, hypervisors are more and more commonly used on top of those OSes for various reasons, such as ease of dedicated environment deployment or load balancing. In contrast to the usual unix process model, hypervisors provide their guests with kernel-level facilities. In this paper, we show how an HPC application and its execution environment can be embedded within a lightweight guest domain, alongside a domain that runs a conventional OS which is only used for administrative purpose. That permits the execution environment to take advantage of kernel-level facilities to improve performance, which would...

ACM SIGOPS …, 1996