Operating Systems

Papers relating to operating system design and implementation.

Enlightening the I/O path: A holistic approach for application performance

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments
Enlightening the I/O Path: A holistic approach for application performance Kim et al., FAST '17 Lots of applications contain a mix of foreground and background tasks. Since we're at the file system level here, for application, think Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and so on. Typically user requests are considered foreground tasks, and tasks such as housekeeping, ... Continue Reading

IncludeOS: A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud systems

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
IncludeOS: A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud systems - Bratterud et al. 2015 There has been lots of excitement around unikernels over the last year, and especially with the recent acquisition of the Unikernel Systems team by Docker (MirageOS, Mergeable Persistent Data Structures, Jitsu: Just-in time summoning of Unikernels). Whereas MirageOS is built around ... Continue Reading

Split-Level IO Scheduling

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Split-Level IO Scheduling - Yang et al. 2015 The central idea in today's paper is pretty simple: block-level I/O schedulers (the most common kind) lack the higher level information necessary to perform write-reordering and accurate accounting, whereas system-call level schedulers have the appropriate context but lack the low-level knowledge needed to build efficient schedulers - ... Continue Reading