Dynamic Customization in the µChoices Operating System

The lifetime of an operating system is long compared with that of its many varied applications and uses. General purpose or flexible systems design are solutions that address such lifetime differences. General purpose systems suffer from size and inefficiency. Flexible operating systems suffer from the overhead introduced by the mechanisms permitting flexibility. Structured dynamic customization facilities are required in order for the system to remain manageable and memory efficient. However, if such overheads can be ameliorated by performance improvements obtained by tuning the system to application behavior, flexibility has little cost. In this paper, we describe a meta-level architecture for dynamically modifying the resource management policies of a micro-kernel operating system. The architecture supports reflective computation through a flexible scripting language embedded in the micro-kernel. Kernel interpreters ensure a safe environment for script execution, allowing user proce..