Underware: An Exokernel for the Internet?

The principles for designing and building shared distributed computing environments are still evolving: today, there exist a myriad of environments targeting different applications serving different user communities. NSF’s GENI initiative proposes a new shared environment to serve as an open testbed for designing and building a Future Internet. The design of GENI, along with other distributed computing environments, must confront core OS issues of isolation, coordinated multiplexing of hardware resources, and abstractions for distributed computing. This paper draws parallels to the extensible OS “kernel wars” of the past, and considers how architectural lessons from that time apply to an Internet OS. Our view echoes, in key respects, the principles of Exokernel a decade ago: the common core of an Internet OS should concern itself narrowly with physical resource management. We refer to this common core as underware to emphasize that it runs underneath existing programming environments for distributed computing.