Towards practical multikernel OSes with MySyS
Yauhen Klimiankou · 2022
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 tightly-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.