Operating Systems with Quality-of-Service Guarantees

• Nemesis (University of Cambridge, UK)
  Pegasus has produced an entirely new operating system, whose design is geared to support of high-performance applications which require a consistent quality of service (QoS), such as those which use multimedia. This operating system, called Nemesis, currently runs on a number of platforms including Intel, Alpha (21064 and 21164) and StrongARM.

  Nemesis is a single-address-space system, with an extremely light-weight kernel ('Nemesis Trusted Supervisor Code', or NTSC), and strong emphasis on performing operating system functions in the user's domain (thus avoiding the need for expensive protection regime changes).

• Roadrunner
  In traditional operating systems, input/output (I/O) subsystems implement a push-pull environment that provides system calls to allow user applications to pull data from or push data to a device. An important set of applications make combined use of push-pull to implement simple streaming, i. e. data is moved from one device to another with no transformations. Using push-pull I/O to implement these applications does not provide maximum performance. This work proposes a kernel design optimized for simple streaming applications. The Roadrunner operating system is being developed specifically to implement multiple, concurrent, high-speed speed data streams with Quality-of-Service (QOS) parameters.
• Scout (University of Arizona) Group Members
  The Scout project is a new operating system project that aims to build a fast, customizable operating system for networked systems by looking at novel ways to structure and construct operating systems. The Scout operating system is designed around the path, which is how data flows between end-points in a system. Paths are primary objects to which resources are allocated in Scout. The Scout system is also exploring new compiler technologies for system design and implementation, based on the insight that extensible operating systems are worthless if no one can build or extend them.
• Sumo (Lancaster University)
  Related to: Chorus
  Over the past few years members of the SUMO team have been designing and implementing a microkernel based system with facilities to support distributed real-time and multimedia applications and ODP based multimedia distributed application platforms. We are interested in both communications and processing support for distributed real-time/ multimedia applications in end systems, and believe that such applications require thread-to-thread real-time support according to user supplied quality of service (QoS) parameters.
• Synthesis (Columbia University)
  Group Members: Henry Massalin
  The Synthesis kernel was one of the first modern operating system projects to use run-time code generation (which Massalin called code synthesis) and fine-grained scheduling to construct a system that responded quickly and dynamically to high-speed devices. The main "draw-back" of Synthesis was that it was written is 68000 macro-assembler. Synthesis has influnced most of the modern extensible research operating systems, including SPIN, Aegis, Scout, and Synthetix.
• Synthetix (Oregon Graduate Institute)
  Group Members: Andrew P. Black, Charles Consel, Calton Pu, et al.
  The Synthetix project is investigating the application of a technique called incremental specialization, a combination of fine-grain modularity and dynamic code generation, to create operating systems which are both highly modular and high-performance. Incremental specialization takes advantage of particular circumstances, not just at compile time, but also at load time and run time, to make specialized optimizations.
• Tornado (University of Toronto)
  Tornado is a new operating system being developed for the NUMAchine that addresses NUMA programming issues using novel approaches, some of which were developed for our previous operating system Hurricane. Tornado uses an object-oriented, building block approach that allows applications to customize policies and adapt them to their performance needs. For research purposes, we intend to tune Tornado for applications with very large data sets that typically do not fit in memory and hence have high I/O demands. We also intend to provide applications with an operating environment that provides predictable performance behavior to allow performance tuning and to allow the application to appropriately parameterize its algorithms at run-time.
• Vino (Harvard University)
  VINO's key attributes are reusability of kernel mechanisms by user-level applications, application-directed kernel policy, and an access-method paradigm similar to that used by database management systems. The goal of VINO is to reduce the size of conventional operating systems by leaving the definition of complex kernel policies with applications. Additionally, the VINO system will provide improved performance for applications, since they can retain more control over their resources. Finally, VINO is designed to enable the development of new applications, such as real-time video, that require explicit control of system resources.