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Singularity: rethinking the software stack

Authors:

James R. LarusAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 41, Issue 2

Pages 37 - 49

https://doi.org/10.1145/1243418.1243424

Published: 01 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Every operating system embodies a collection of design decisions. Many of the decisions behind today's most popular operating systems have remained unchanged, even as hardware and software have evolved. Operating systems form the foundation of almost every software stack, so inadequacies in present systems have a pervasive impact. This paper describes the efforts of the Singularity project to re-examine these design choices in light of advances in programming languages and verification tools. Singularity systems incorporate three key architectural features: software-isolated processes for protection of programs and system services, contract-based channels for communication, and manifest-based programs for verification of system properties. We describe this foundation in detail and sketch the ongoing research in experimental systems that build upon it.

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Cited By

Chen XLi ZJain TNarayanan VBurtsev ABagchi SZhang Y(2024)Limitations and opportunities of modern hardware isolation mechanismsProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692013(349-368)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 41, Issue 2

Systems work at Microsoft Research

April 2007

93 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/1243418

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Copyright © 2007 Authors.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2007

Published in SIGOPS Volume 41, Issue 2

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Cited By

Chen XLi ZJain TNarayanan VBurtsev ABagchi SZhang Y(2024)Limitations and opportunities of modern hardware isolation mechanismsProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692013(349-368)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691992.3692013
Chen HMiao XJia NWang NLi YLiu NLiu YWang FHuang QLi KYang HWang HYin JPeng YXu FGavrilovska ATerry D(2024)Microkernel goes generalProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691963(465-485)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691938.3691963
Ma HQiao YLiu SYu SNi YLu QWu JZhang YKim MXu HGavrilovska ATerry D(2024)DRustProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691944(97-115)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691938.3691944
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Mahar SShen MSmith TIzraelevitz JSwanson S(2024)Puddles: Application-Independent Recovery and Location-Independent Data for Persistent MemoryProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3629555(575-589)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
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