NrOS - Effective Replication and Sharing in an Operating System

Explore a groundbreaking approach to operating system kernel development in this 15-minute conference talk from OSDI '21. Dive into NrOS, a novel OS kernel that tackles the challenges of manual memory management, type-unsafe code, and complex asynchronous events. Learn how the researchers from the University of Utah, University of British Columbia, VMware Research, and EPFL have reimagined kernel synchronization by implementing a primarily sequential design scaled across NUMA nodes using node replication. Discover how this approach, inspired by state machine replication in distributed systems, simplifies development, improves reasoning about correctness, and eliminates remote NUMA accesses. Examine the evaluation results showing NrOS's impressive scalability to 96 cores and its performance advantages over Linux at scale, while maintaining the simplicity of a sequential kernel.