Wayfinder: Automated Operating System Specialization
Alexander Jung, Cezar Craciunoiu, Nikolaos Karaolidis, Hugo Lefeuvre, Daniel Oñoro Rubio, Felipe Huici, Charalampos Rotsos, Pierre Olivier · 2026
Operating system specialization is a well-known approach to optimize a specific application's performance, memory usage, security, or other important metrics. Specializing an OS for an application is typically a manual process that requires great expertise. Specialization through configuration lends itself well to automation; however, it is challenging due to the sheer size of the configuration space of modern OSes, the difficulty to quantify that space, the long time it takes to evaluate a configuration, and the large number of invalid configurations. Hence, existing attempts at specializing OSes automatically are limited to switching features on and off to minimize memory consumption or attack surface, and cannot target metrics such as performance.