Improving dependability by revisiting operating system design

Existing operating system (OS) designs provide inadequate isolation of user applications from errors that occur in OS services. If an error causes the failure of an OS service, all dependent applications are affected. The OS design described in this paper ameliorates this problem by reorganizing OS state in an effort to make OS services transparently restartable. This is achieved by partitioning application-related OS state into isolated per-application memory regions. Access to these memory regions is provided to OS services on a "need-to-know" basis when processing application requests. Applications are not allowed access to these memory regions for security. This design helps improve the dependability of the system.

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