Verified systems software has generally had to assume the correctness of the operating system and its provided services (like networking and the file system). Even though there exist verified operating systems and file systems, the specifications for these components do not compose with applications to produce a fully verified high-performance software stack.

Building persistent memory (PM) data structures is difficult because crashes interrupt operations, leaving data structures in an inconsistent state. Solving this requires augmenting code that modifies PM state to ensure that interrupted operations can be completed or undone. Today, this is done using careful, hand-crafted code, a compiler pass, or page faults. We propose a new, easy way to transform volatile data structure code to work with PM that uses a cache-coherent accelerator to do this augmentation, and we show that it may outperform existing approaches for building PM structures.

Rust is the first practical programming language that has the potential to provide fine-grained isolation of untrusted computations at the language level. A combination of zero-overhead safety, i.e., safety without a managed runtime and garbage collection, and a unique ownership discipline enable isolation in systems with tight performance budgets, e.g., databases, network processing frameworks, browsers, and even operating system kernels.

In a multi-CPU server, memory modules are local to the CPU to which they are connected, forming a nonuniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. Because non-local accesses are slower than local accesses, the NUMA architecture might degrade application performance. Similar slowdowns occur when an I/O device issues nonuniform DMA (NUDMA) operations, as the device is connected to memory via a single CPU. NUDMA effects therefore degrade application performance similarly to NUMA effects.

Memory-centric computing demands careful organization of the virtual address space, but traditional methods for doing so are inflexible and inefficient. If an application wishes to address larger physical memory than virtual address bits allow, if it wishes to maintain pointer-based data structures beyond process lifetimes, or if it wishes to share large amounts of memory across simultaneously executing processes, legacy interfaces for managing the address space are cumbersome and often incur excessive overheads. We propose a new operating system design that promotes virtual address spaces to first-class citizens, enabling process threads to attach to, detach from, and switch between multiple virtual address spaces. Our work enables data-centric applications to utilize vast physical memory beyond the virtual range, represent persistent pointer-rich data structures without special pointer representations, and share large amounts of memory between processes efficiently.

For decades, database engines have found the generic interfaces offered by the operating systems at odds with the need for efficient utilization of hardware resources. As a result, most engines circumvent the OS and manage hardware directly. With the growing complexity and heterogeneity of modern hardware, database engines are now facing a steep increase in the complexity they must absorb to achieve good performance. Taking advantage of recent proposals in operating system design, such as multi-kernels, in this paper we explore the development of a light weight OS kernel tailored for data processing and discuss its benefits for simplifying the design and improving the performance of data management systems.