Thursday, October 6, 2016

Discussion Notes on Arrakis : The Operating System is the Control Plane



Hi All,
I was a transcriber of one discussion about this OSDI'14 best paper and responsible to answer many open questions.  Full content is in the PDF: Discussion Notes on Arrakis-The Operating System is the Control Plane.pdf. 

The following digested description is from the PDF.

  • Main Idea
    • Arrakis achieved high performance through the isolation between control and data plane.  This paper moved data plane from its own kernel to user mode because of virtualization supported by recent hardware devices.
  • Contribution
    • Provided an OS prototype to achieve the separation of chores between the I/O devices (Networking/Disk), kernel, user applications. This prototype can then scale its capability to multi-core processors based on the Barrelfish[1]. Finally, authors evaluated their prototype through the quantified ex- amination of Memcached[2], Redis[3], and HTTP load balancer.
  • ...  Please see the PDF
  • Conclusion
    • I really appreciate this paper demonstrated the possibility that minimizing kernel can improve performance based one the modern hardware. I can not wait to see more microkernel OSes which can be sped up; therefore future microkernel OSes can have robustness as well as high performance. Finally, if this notes have any mistake or ambiguous points, welcome to correct me through Email or comments.