(July 23th) Designing Operating Systems for 2020s

The traditional operating system design is in question as significant advances in hardware technologies and drastic changes in the use of the operating system in modern data center applications. In this talk, I will present two of my recent work, Solros and HermiTux, which address the new challenges in operating system design. Solros is a new operating system architecture for heterogeneous systems that comprise fast host processors, slow but massively-parallel co-processors, and fast I/O devices. In Solros architecture, co-processor OS (data-plane OS) delegates its services, specifically I/O stacks, to the host OS (control-plane OS) so we make the best use of specialized processors and can efficiently perform global coordination with system-wide knowledge. HermiTux is a unikernel, which is a minimal operating system executing just one application. Since HermiTux is specialized to run one application, it does not include any unused code unlike general-purpose operating system so it reduces attack surface significantly. Moreover, HermiTux is binary-compatible with Linux so it can run native Linux executables.