USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
Why Hacker News recommends it
Repeatedly recommended as a revelatory talk on how little control the main OS has over modern SoCs and PCs.
What it is
Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.
Recommended by 12 HN commenters across 9 different months, 2021 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec bcantrill · 2021-10 · on “Rust, Wright's Law, and the Future of Low-Latency Systems”
I know that I recommended it in the talk, but I highly recommend Timothy Roscoe's OSDI keynote[0] -- and may also be worth catching the Twitter Space we did a few weeks ago discussing it.[1] [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]
Strong rec dist1ll · 2022-11 · on “Tales of the M1 GPU”
There's this great USENIX talk by Timothy Roscoe [1], which is part of the Enzian Team at ETH Zürich. It's about the dominant unholistic approach to modern operating system design, which is reflected in the vast number of independent, proprietary, under-documented RTOSes running in tandem on a single system, and eventually leading to uninspiring and lackluster OS research (e.g. Linux monoculture). I'm guessing that hardware and software industries just don't have well-aligned interests, which unfortunately leaks into OS R&D. [1] [this video]
Strong rec jcgl · 2026-02 · on “C Isn't a Language”
This isn’t my space to opine on, but I found this talk both riveting and compelling: [this video] In a nutshell, the useful fiction of computer-as-Von-Neumann-meaning doesn’t adequately reflect the reality of modern hardware. Not only does the CPU itself not fit that model (with things like speculative execution, sophisticated power and load management…), but the system as a whole is increasingly an amalgamation of different processors and address spaces.
Recommends lostdog · 2021-12 · on “On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust [video]”
Very interesting. This reminds me a ton of L4, with its message passing style. I'm curious if it was inspired by L4. It's a great talk, and my only disappointment was that I was hoping to hear about what comes after. After watching the OS talk that Cantrill references [0], I really want to know the answer to "what does an OS that runs across a bunch of heterogeneous chips look like?" Having Hubris be just a single-node OS was a bit of a let down, so I will be staying tuned for the sequels. [0] [this video] EDIT: Went to go read the docs and: "The operating system that originally made this point was L4, and Hubris’s IPC mechanism is directly inspired by L4’s"
Recommends mikewarot · 2021-12 · on “Ask HN: "Know Your Hardware”: best books/resources to learn?”
First of all, watch this, and learn that there's a whole stack of layers below what Linux can even touch these days. [this video] For a theoretical understanding, with a much simpler model, I suggest the Nand2Tetris course.
Recommends the_duke · 2022-02 · on “I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors – half lose FLUSH’d data on power loss”
I can recommend the related talk "It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware". [1] It explores how modern systems are a set of cooperating devices (each with their own OS) while our main operating systems still pretend to be fully in charge. [1] [this video]
Recommends zerohp · 2022-10 · on “How to tell a mainframe from a minicomputer from a micro”
> So as someone else commented, a mainframe isn't really a computer, it's a whole cluster of closely-coupled computers, many with dedicated functionality. Quite possibly all implemented with different architectures, instruction sets, programming languages, bit widths, everything. Nearly all computers more powerful than a simple microcontroller look like this in 2022. If you find this fact surprising, you'll probably want to take a look at this talk from USENIX ATC '21: [this video]
Recommends mlindner · 2022-10 · on “I have come to bury the BIOS, not to open it [video]”
> I would really like to know if my x86 'linux PC', is actually running another 'hypervisor' OS that runs Linux - it seems like a recipe for security vulnerabilities. There's not so much a "hypervisor" OS, but instead a congealed set of many different OSes, some realtime OSes, some possibly old Linux variants, some possibly closed source proprietary one-off OSes. I suggest taking a look at the talk Bryan mentioned: [this video]