  In the future, computing will be immersed in the world around us -- from
augmented reality to autonomous vehicles to the Internet of Things. Many of
these smart devices will offer services that respond in real time to their
physical surroundings, requiring complex processing with strict performance
guarantees. Edge clouds promise a pervasive computational infrastructure a
short network hop away from end devices, but today's operating systems are a
poor fit to meet the goals of scalable isolation, dense multi-tenancy, and
predictable performance required by these emerging applications. In this paper
we present EdgeOS, a micro-kernel based operating system that meets these goals
by blending recent advances in real-time systems and network function
virtualization. EdgeOS introduces a Featherweight Process model that offers
lightweight isolation and supports extreme scalability even under high churn.
Our architecture provides efficient communication mechanisms, and low-overhead
per-client isolation. To achieve high performance networking, EdgeOS employs
kernel bypass paired with the isolation properties of Featherweight Processes.
We have evaluated our EdgeOS prototype for running high scale network
middleboxes using the Click software router and endpoint applications using
memcached. EdgeOS reduces startup latency by 170X compared to Linux processes
and over five orders of magnitude compared to containers, while providing three
orders of magnitude latency improvement when running 300 to 1000 edge-cloud
memcached instances on one server.

Operating Systems