Title
XOS: An Application-Defined Operating System for Datacenter Computing
Abstract
Rapid growth of datacenter (DC) scale, urgency of cost control, increasing workload diversity, and huge software investment protection place unprecedented demands on the operating system (OS) efficiency, scalability, performance isolation, and backward-compatibility. The traditional OSes are not built to work with deep-hierarchy software stacks, large numbers of cores, tail latency guarantee, and increasingly rich variety of applications seen in modern DCs, and thus they struggle to meet the demands of such workloads. This paper presents XOS, an application-defined OS for modern DC servers. Our design moves resource management out of the OS kernel, supports customizable kernel subsystems in user space, and enables elastic partitioning of hardware resources. Specifically, XOS leverages modern hardware support for virtualization to move resource management functionality out of the conventional kernel and into user space, which lets applications achieve near bare-metal performance. We implement XOS on top of Linux to provide backward compatibility. XOS speeds up a set of DC workloads by up to 1.6× over our baseline Linux on a 24-core server, and outperforms the state-of-the-art Dune by up to 3.3× in terms of virtual memory management. In addition, XOS demonstrates good scalability and strong performance isolation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/BigData.2018.8622507
2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Operating System,Datacenter,Application-defined,Scalability,Performance Isolation
Virtualization,Resource management,Computer science,Temporal isolation among virtual machines,Server,Software,User space,Operating system,Backward compatibility,Scalability
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2639-1589
978-1-5386-5036-3
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chen Zheng151.16
Lei Wang257746.85
Sally A. Mckee31928152.59
Lixin Zhang4212.69
hainan ye573.93
Jianfeng Zhan676762.86