research-article Open Access Share on Composing Abstractions using the null-Kernel Authors: James Litton University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Software SystemsView Profile , Deepak Garg Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Max Planck Institute for Software SystemsView Profile , Peter Druschel Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Max Planck Institute for Software SystemsView Profile , Bobby Bhattacharjee University of Maryland University of MarylandView Profile Authors Info & Claims HotOS '19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating SystemsMay 2019 Pages 1–6https://doi.org/10.1145/3317550.3321450Published:13 May 2019Publication History 1citation1,283DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads1,283Last 12 Months200Last 6 weeks13 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Cloud computing has evolved to meet user demands, from arbitrary VMs offered by IaaS to the narrow application interfaces of PaaS. Unfortunately, there exists an intermediate point that is not well met by today's offerings: users who wish to run arbitrary, already available binaries (as opposed to rewriting their own application for a PaaS) yet expect their applications to be long-lived but mostly idle (as opposed to the always-on VM of IaaS). For example, end users who wish to run their own email or DNS server.

Portable computing devices have fast multi-core processors, large memories, and many on-board sensors and radio interfaces, but are often limited by their energy consumption. Traditional power management subsystems have been extended for smartphones and other portable devices, with the intention of maximizing the time that the devices are in a low-power "sleep" state. The approaches taken by these subsystems prove inefficient for many short-lived tasks common to portable devices, e.g., querying a sensor or polling a cloud service.