Rethinking OSes for Datacenters

This lecture discusses the challenges faced by traditional OSes in datacenters due to the rapid growth of data and the inability to keep up with I/O improvements. The instructor presents a new approach called Junction, which combines kernel bypass with resource multiplexing to improve performance, security, and utilization simultaneously. By shifting functionality to userspace, Junction reduces kernel crossing overhead and enables faster reactions to system calls. The lecture showcases how Junction achieves significant performance improvements without the need to rewrite applications. Through comparisons with VMs, libOSes, and containers, the lecture demonstrates Junction's ability to maintain high performance while enhancing resource sharing. The impact of Junction is highlighted as a design, a state-of-the-art baseline, and a platform for new cloud programming models.