Arrakis: The Operating System as Control Plane

The recent trend toward hardware virtualization enables a new approach to the design of operating systems: instead of the operating system mediating access to the hardware, applications run directly on top of virtualized I/O devices, where the OS kernel provides only control plane services. This new division of labor is transparent to the application developer, but allows applications to offer better performance, security, and extensibility than was previously possible. After explaining the need for such an operating system design, we discuss the hardware and software challenges to realizing it and propose an implementation—Arrakis.