Exokernels, Protocol implementation and Erlang

In this report, we will discuss how ideas in the experimental operating system architectures called exokernels can be used to improve performance of the Erlang systems and programs written in Erlang, with an emphasis on protocol implementations written in Erlang. We will present experiences and conclusions. 1 Introduction The current "breed" of traditional operating systems abstract and multiplex hardware resources in a way that will work for almost all possible applications. Often portability is the objective --- they try to provide abstractions that are not specific to a certain implementation of e.g. hard disks or network cards. They typically do not stop there, they also implement additional general abstractions such as file systems, virtual memory systems and protocol stacks. The abstractions provided by an OS are often integrated with safe multiplexing of the hardware resources in a such way that the abstractions cannot be circumvented without losing the safe multiplexing. Safet..