USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware

What people said

jcgl · 2026-02 · Strong recommendation

This isn’t my space to opine on, but I found this talk both riveting and compelling: [VIDEO] In a nutshell, the useful fiction of computer-as-Von-Neumann-meaning doesn’t adequately reflect the reality of modern hardware. Not only does the CPU itself not fit that model (with things like speculative execution, sophisticated power and load management…), but the system as a whole is increasingly an amalgamation of different processors and address spaces.

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dist1ll · 2022-11 · Strong recommendation

There's this great USENIX talk by Timothy Roscoe [1], which is part of the Enzian Team at ETH Zürich. It's about the dominant unholistic approach to modern operating system design, which is reflected in the vast number of independent, proprietary, under-documented RTOSes running in tandem on a single system, and eventually leading to uninspiring and lackluster OS research (e.g. Linux monoculture). I'm guessing that hardware and software industries just don't have well-aligned interests, which unfortunately leaks into OS R&D. [1] [VIDEO]

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bcantrill · 2021-10 · Strong recommendation

I know that I recommended it in the talk, but I highly recommend Timothy Roscoe's OSDI keynote[0] -- and may also be worth catching the Twitter Space we did a few weeks ago discussing it.[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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