In many ways this reminds me of the L4 project [1] - very lightweight "shared nothing" processes, semi-cooperatively scheduled [2] and with attention paid to mi

In many ways this reminds me of the L4 project [1] - very lightweight "shared nothing" processes, semi-cooperatively scheduled [2] and with attention paid to minimising the context switch overhead. And this was before "shared nothing" was a thing. It's a real shame that so few of Jochen Liedtke's ideas have percolated into mainstream OSses. [1] http://www.l4ka.org/ http://www.l4ka.org/ [2] IIRC, a source process sending a message would 'donate' the rest of its time-slice to the destination process, meaning short "RPC" calls could be done without invoking the scheduler while keeping many of the benefits of pre-emptive scheduling.