In reply to many comments about the lack of safety of the approach: They claim that "[they] demonstrate that operating system protection is not contradictory wi

In reply to many comments about the lack of safety of the approach: They claim that "[they] demonstrate that operating system protection is not contradictory with high performance". Abstract of their latest paper: Recent device hardware trends enable a new approach to the design of network server operating systems. In a traditional operating system, the kernel mediates access to device hardware by server applications, to enforce pro- cess isolation as well as network and disk security. We have designed and implemented a new operating system, Arrakis, that splits the traditional role of the kernel in two. Applications have direct access to virtualized I/O devices, allowing most I/O operations to skip the ker- nel entirely, while the kernel is re-engineered to provide network and disk protection without kernel mediation of every operation. We describe the hardware and software changes needed to take advantage of this new abstraction, and we illustrate its power by showing 2-5x end-to-end latency and 9x throughput improvements for a popular persistent NoSQL store [i.e. Redis] relative to a well-tuned Linux implementation. http://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/arrakis-tr-ver2.pdf http://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/...