The case for application-specific operating systems

Recent evidence suggests that trends will require rethinking the traditional role of operating systems. The challenge to operating systems designers is to deliver to applications the performance available now only from dedicated hardware, combined with the ease of sharing resources and data among multiple applications and the simpler programming model found in general-purpose operating systems. An application-specific structure is proposed where as much of the operating system as possible is pushed into runtime library routines linked with each application. The operating system kernel is stripped to its bare minimum functionality. At a minimum, the kernel must adjudicate among application requests for physical resources, and it must enforce hardware protection boundaries by operating system code running as library routines in each application. The key is that the operating system must notify each application of changes in its resource allocation, to allow the application on the chance to adapt to make best use of whatever resources are available to it.<>