DB/OS Co-Design in the MxKernel Project

Abstract

Better integrating layers in the system software stack is seen as a promising way to leverage the potential of modern hardware technologies. In my talk I will describe our vision in the MxKernel project to make the co-design of databases and operating systems real. In MxKernel fundamentally change the process abstraction from threads to “tasks.” Tasks represent small units of work, rather than (lengthy) pieces of control flow. This makes them a better abstraction to enrich them with information about application characteristics. In the talk I will illustrate how this enables (a) automatic data prefetching by the task scheduler and (b) synchronization in multi-core environments with less developer effort, yet lower contention during execution.