Skip to content
The methodOpen data
Back to the collection

DBOS: A Proposal for a Data-Centric Operating System

Michael Cafarella, David DeWitt, Vijay Gadepally

Show all 8 authors

Jeremy Kepner, Christos Kozyrakis, Tim Kraska, Michael Stonebraker, Matei Zaharia

2020 · arXiv

Computer systemsSecurity & cryptographyDatabases
Read the paper
HN score
0
Mentions
3
Readers
3
Months
3
What’s in a score?

From the abstract

Current operating systems are complex systems that were designed before today's computing environments. This makes it difficult for them to meet the scalability, heterogeneity, availability, and security challenges in current cloud and parallel computing environments. To address these problems, we propose a radically new OS design based on data-centric architecture: all operating system state should be represented uniformly as database tables, and operations on this state should be made via queries from otherwise stateless tasks. This design makes it easy to scale and evolve the OS without whole-system refactoring, inspect and debug system state, upgrade components without downtime, manage decisions using machine learning, and implement sophisticated security features. We discuss how a database OS (DBOS) can improve the programmability and performance of many of today's most important applications and propose a plan for the development of a DBOS proof of concept.

Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.

In the conversation

Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

Jtsummers
Neutral mention · rule
Sounds like that's actually their plan for the first pass (reading their papers now): > While the DBMS engine will need some basic resource management functionality to bootstrap its execution, this could be done over a cluster of servers running current OSs, and eventually bootstrapped over the new DBOS. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11112
Original comment DBOS: A database-oriented operating system
rubiquity
Neutral mention · rule
DBOS: A Proposal for a Data-Centric Operating System https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11112 Even if a bit impractical in some regrards, I think an operating system/cloud that you interact with like a database is something we should aspirationally strive for. We're spending too much time gluing things together and not enough time being productive. Databases are great at tracking and describing resources (much better than YAML) and stored procedures that are like Lambdas would be neat.
Original comment Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?

Keep following the thread.

More in Computer systems

More from the same topics.

2017arXiv

The Case for Learned Index Structures

Tim Kraska, Alex Beutel, Ed H. Chi +2

Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the position of a record within a sorted array, a Hash-Index as a model to map a key to a position of a record within an unsorted array, and a BitMap-Index as a model to indicate if a data record exists or not.

Databases
19 mentions14 months
5HN score