Researchers have long predicted the demise of the operating system [21, 26, 41]. As datacenter servers increasingly incorporate I/O devices that let applications bypass the OS kernel (e.g., RDMA [12] and DPDK [15] network devices or SPDK storage devices), this prediction may finally come true. While kernel-bypass devices do eliminate the OS kernel from the I/O path, they do not handle the kernel's most important job: offering higher-level abstractions. This paper argues for a new high-level, device-agnostic I/O abstraction for kernel-bypass devices. We propose the Demikernel, a new library OS architecture for kernel-bypass devices. It defines a high-level, kernel-bypass I/O abstraction and provides user-space library OSes to implement that abstraction across a range of kernel-bypass devices. The Demikernel makes applications easier to build, portable across devices, and unmodified as devices continue to evolve.

Distributed systems are notorious for harboring subtle bugs. Verification can, in principle, eliminate these bugs a priori, but verification has historically been difficult to apply at full-program scale, much less distributed-system scale.