Presentation: The Operating System in 2018

Why care about the operating system any more? Linux has been around for decades aren't we just done? Actually, there is a huge set of shifts happening in the operating system, and this talk will explain these changes. The operating system space is getting interesting again! 

First, performance is changing everything. The development of faster networking, now at 100Gb and above, combined with faster flash storage, means that our tools need to change in order to make all that performance available to applications and to keep tail latency under control. This led to the development of userspace drivers and a whole new high-performance programming language in the Linux kernel, eBPF. 

Another major change is that emulation is back. Microsoft has Linux running natively on Windows, while Google has gVisor, which emulates Linux on Linux. Why is this happening, and what are the use cases? What new directions will emulation take us? 

Two things though have not changed much yet. The programming languages used in operating systems are pretty much unchanged, with C dominating, and the use of alternatives to the traditional OS, such as unikernels, microkernels and other alternatives have been slow. We look at why this is and how it may change.