Implementing new operating systems is tedious, costly, and often impractical except for large projects. The Flux OSKit addresses this problem in a novel way by providing clean, well-documented OS components designed to be reused in a wide variety of other environments, rather than defining a new OS structure. The OSKit uses unconventional techniques to maximize its usefulness, such as intentionally exposing implementation details and platform-specific facilities. Further, the OSKit demonstrates a technique that allows unmodified code from existing mature operating systems to be incorporated quickly and updated regularly, by wrapping it with a small amount of carefully designed “glue” code to isolate its dependencies and export well-defined interfaces. The OSKit uses this technique to incorporate over 230,000 lines of stable code including device drivers, file systems, and network protocols. Our experience demonstrates that this approach to component software structure and reuse has a surprisingly large impact in the OS implementation domain. Four real-world examples show how the OSKit is catalyzing research and development in operating systems and programming languages. 1

This paper identifies some of the key performance optimizations used in Peregrine, and quantitatively assesses their benefits

Distributed systems such as client-server applications and cluster-based parallel computation are an important part of modern computing. Distributed computing allows the balancing of processing load, increases program modularity, isolates functionality, and can provide an element of fault tolerance. In these environments, systems must be able to synchronize and share data through some mechanism for remote interprocess communication (IPC). Although distributed systems have many advantages, they also pose several challenges. One important challenge is transparency. It is desirable that applications can be written to a communication interface that hides the details of distribution. One way to achieve transparency is through the extension of local communication mechanisms over a network for remote communication. The ability to transparently extend local communication depends on the semantics of the local IPC mechanisms. Unfortunately, those semantics are often driven by other architectural...