Towards practical multikernel OSes with MySyS

Yauhen Klimiankou
2022 Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems  
The multikernel operating system architecture appeared over a decade ago in response to a significant shift in an underlying computer system architecture that saw a massive transition from unicore to multicore processors to deal with scalability and hardware diversity issues. Multikernel considers the computer a distributed system, directly reflects this observation to the OS design and proposes several respective design principles. In particular, multikernel OS constructs the system as a
more » ... y-coupled distributed operating system consisting of a network of isolated nodes and interconnections between them. Furthermore, it replaces implicit inter-core communication through shared memory by explicit message passing and maintains a general OS state using replication. The original multikernel design was prototyped in the experimental operating system Barrelfish and proved that it scales better than conventional Linux in environments of many-core computer systems. While over a decade has passed after the multikernel OS design introduction, we still failed to see any significant application of its ideas outside of academic research. We reevaluate the architecture of multikernel OS and their design principles from the practical application viewpoint and consider the current state of the art in the microprocessor market, reconsidering assumptions made ten years ago. We highlight the advantages of multikernel OS design and the problems preventing its industrial adoption. Finally, we propose a practical way to overcome these challenges and promote beneficial practical applications of the new OS architecture.
doi:10.1145/3546591.3547525 fatcat:bo3omycbxzbvjaoufe6uqwnncy