USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware

I know that I recommended it in the talk, but I highly recommend Timothy Roscoe's OSDI keynote[0] -- and may also be worth catching the Twitter Space we did a few weeks ago discussing it.[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

There's this great USENIX talk by Timothy Roscoe [1], which is part of the Enzian Team at ETH Zürich. It's about the dominant unholistic approach to modern operating system design, which is reflected in the vast number of independent, proprietary, under-documented RTOSes running in tandem on a single system, and eventually leading to uninspiring and lackluster OS research (e.g. Linux monoculture). I'm guessing that hardware and software industries just don't have well-aligned interests, which unfortunately leaks into OS R&D. [1] [VIDEO]

This isn’t my space to opine on, but I found this talk both riveting and compelling: [VIDEO] In a nutshell, the useful fiction of computer-as-Von-Neumann-meaning doesn’t adequately reflect the reality of modern hardware. Not only does the CPU itself not fit that model (with things like speculative execution, sophisticated power and load management…), but the system as a whole is increasingly an amalgamation of different processors and address spaces.

Very interesting. This reminds me a ton of L4, with its message passing style. I'm curious if it was inspired by L4. It's a great talk, and my only disappointment was that I was hoping to hear about what comes after. After watching the OS talk that Cantrill references [0], I really want to know the answer to "what does an OS that runs across a bunch of heterogeneous chips look like?" Having Hubris be just a single-node OS was a bit of a let down, so I will be staying tuned for the sequels. [0] [VIDEO] EDIT: Went to go read the docs and: "The operating system that originally made this point was L4, and Hubris’s IPC mechanism is directly inspired by L4’s"

First of all, watch this, and learn that there's a whole stack of layers below what Linux can even touch these days. [VIDEO] For a theoretical understanding, with a much simpler model, I suggest the Nand2Tetris course.

I can recommend the related talk "It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware". [1] It explores how modern systems are a set of cooperating devices (each with their own OS) while our main operating systems still pretend to be fully in charge. [1] [VIDEO]

> So as someone else commented, a mainframe isn't really a computer, it's a whole cluster of closely-coupled computers, many with dedicated functionality. Quite possibly all implemented with different architectures, instruction sets, programming languages, bit widths, everything. Nearly all computers more powerful than a simple microcontroller look like this in 2022. If you find this fact surprising, you'll probably want to take a look at this talk from USENIX ATC '21: [VIDEO]

> I would really like to know if my x86 'linux PC', is actually running another 'hypervisor' OS that runs Linux - it seems like a recipe for security vulnerabilities. There's not so much a "hypervisor" OS, but instead a congealed set of many different OSes, some realtime OSes, some possibly old Linux variants, some possibly closed source proprietary one-off OSes. I suggest taking a look at the talk Bryan mentioned: [VIDEO]