Title	
Managing resources in the data-center with the MxKernel

Authors	
Michael Müller

E-Mail	
michael.mueller@uos.de

Affiliation	
Osnabrück University

Abstract	

Data-centers are the backbone of today’s online services and contrary of what the name suggests are not limited to database applications. On the contrary, the applications running in a data-center are as diverse as those on desktop machines. This is why data centers should be seen as distributed general-purpose computers. The hardware, on the other hand, is much more heterogeneous in both the kinds of computing devices as well as types of memory and networking. These are for example RDMA, Near-Memory Computing, smart NICs, FPGAs and more, which are usually not found on a desktop PC. However the operating systems used in the data-center are designed originally for a completely different kind of computing hardware in mind. The limitations forced upon applications by decade-old OS interfaces and abstractions, are more and more becoming a serious performance and resource management problem. To achieve performance, today’s data-center applications and frameworks often circumvent the OS entirely by implementing drivers and protocols in user-space or pushing resource management down to the hardware level. Even-though, this way one might gain performance, it makes resource management much more difficult and also opens up new security risks, as devices outside of OS-control become programmable. The dilemma for operating systems for the data-center is that while having to support general-purpose workloads, they also need to provide application-specific OS interfaces for increasing performance. The traditional monolithic operating system with its fixed and often limited interface has already proven to be an obstacle rather than a solution. Therefore, we argue that modern operating systems shall follow a component-based architecture that allows various application-specific abstractions and interfaces, as well as OS services, to coexist simultaneously while still retaining the ability of managing and controlling resources globally. Based on the component-based architecture of the Genode OS framework, the MxKernel architecture adds new concepts and abstractions to tackle the challenges presented to operating systems in modern data-centers. As resource management and control is the major task of modern operating systems, we present how the concepts of MxKernel and its components shall interact to provide global management for heterogeneous resources while also providing application-specific OS interfaces.

Language of the Presentation	
English