Broad New OS Research: Challenges and Opportunities
Galen C. Hunt, James R. Larus, David Tarditi, Ted Wobber · 2005
Contemporary software systems are beset by prob-lems that create challenges and opportunities for broad new OS research. To illustrate, we describe five areas where broad OS research could significantly improve the current user experience. These areas are depend-ability, security, system configuration, system exten-sion, and multi-processor programming. In each area we explore how contemporary systems fall short. Where we have thought of possible solutions, we offer directions for future research. Finally, we describe Singularity, a research project at Microsoft Research that is building a new operating system to explore four of these challenges. Singularity incorporates three specific design decisions in order to increase system dependability and improve system se-curity, configuration, and extension. These design de-cisions include the adoption of an abstract instruction set as part of the system binary interface, a unified ex-tension architecture for both the OS and applications, and a first-class application abstraction. 1.