On Monday, October 28th at 18:30, Haifux will gather to hear a talk by
Nadav Har'El:
OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines
Abstract
These days, most applications running on virtual machines in the cloud
run on top of Linux. We all love Linux, but as an all-encompassing
operating system for everything from phones to supercomputers, Linux was
never really designed for virtual machines; It is big and complex, and
it offers features (such as multi-user and multi-process) which are
today made redundant by the hypervisor and slow it down. Linux's APIs
are many times set in stone by decades of legacy code. All these cost in
application performance, and make it harder to innovate.
This is why OSv was developed, a new operating system designed to run a
single application on a virtual machine. As it runs a single application
there is no need for kernel-userspace isolation, reducing context switch
costs and unnecessary copying. A design from scratch allowed us to
experiment with new ideas like lock-free mutexes (solving the
Lock-Holder Preemption problem that plagues operating systems on virtual
machines), extremely fast context switches, Van Jacobson's network
channels and more. Also, OSv is released under the more permissive BSD
license (not GPL like Linux), is tiny compared to Linux, and takes less
than one second to boot and start the user's application.
OSv can run ordinary Linux shared objects, such as, for example, an
unmodified JVM (e.g., OpenJDK) executable, and of course on that you can
run any application written in Java, JRuby , Clojure, or any other JVM
language. Even at this early stage of OSv's development, OSv can already
successfully run several interesting workloads such as Netperf,
Memcached, Cassandra and SpecJVM - and usually match or even beat
Linux's performance.
Another refreshing feature of OSv is that is written in C++. It's been
40 years since Unix was (re)written in C, and the time has come for
something better. C++ is not about writing super-complex type
hierarchies (as some people might have you believe). Rather, it allowed
us to write shorter code with less boiler-plate repetition and less
chances for bugs. It allowed us to more easily reuse quality code and
data structures. And using newly standardized C++ features, we were able
to write safe concurrent code with standard language features instead of
processor-specific hacks. And all of this with zero performance
overheads - most of C++'s features, most notably templates, are
compile-time features which result in no run-time overhead compared to C
code.
OSv was developed by Cloudius Systems, a small Israeli startup led by
Dor Laor and Avi Kivity (of KVM fame) but it is an open-source project -
developed since its inception on github, and released under the BSD
license. We would like to take this opportunity to invite everyone to
use OSv, and to help drive its development forward. OSv is a fantastic
playground for kernel developers, and also for people involved in cloud
development, devops, and so on. Tell us what your dream VM operating
system will do, and maybe your dream will come true :-) Maybe you can
even help us make that dream come true.
=================================================================
We meet in Taub building, room 6. For instructions see:
http://www.haifux.org/where.html
Attendance is free, and you are all invited!
==================================================================
Future lectures:
11/11/13 THIS SLOT CAN BE YOURS
25/11/13 Nested Virtualization: Shadow Turtles: Muli Ben-Yehuda
==================================================================
We are always interested in hearing your talks and ideas. If you wish to
give a talk, hold a discussion, or just plan some event haifux might be
interested in, please contact us at webmas...@haifux.org
--
Web: http://www.billauer.co.il
_______________________________________________
Linux-il mailing list
Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
