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It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel – Embedded in Academia

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Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis has long been one of my favorites. It promotes the view that operating systems can be much more efficient than then-current operating systems via runtime code generation, lock-free synchronization, and fine-grained scheduling. In this piece we’ll only look at runtime code generation, which can be cleanly separated from the other aspects of this work. The promise of kernel-mode runtime code generation is that we can have very fast, feature-rich operating systems by, for example, not including code implementing generic read() and write() system calls, but rather synthesizing code for these operations each time a file is opened. The idea is that at file open time, the OS has a lot of information that it can use to generate highly specialized code, eliding code paths that are provably not going to execute. Runtime code generation was a well-known idea in 1992, but it wasn’t used nearly as widely as it is today. In 2019, of course, just-in-time compilers ar

It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel – Embedded in Academia It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis has long been one of my favorites. It promotes the view that operating systems can be much more efficient than then-current operating systems via runtime code generation, lock-free synchronization, and fine-grained scheduling. In this piece we’ll only look at runtime code generation, which can be cleanly separated from the other aspects of this work. Runtime Code Generation in Ring 0 The promise of kernel-mode runtime code genera

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