Rhodes: A Next-Generation OS based on Resource Governance Model

The kernel is the core part of an operating system. At present, four types of kernels are widely available: monolithic kernels, microkernels, hybrid kernels, and exokernels. These kernel architectures are either too tightly-coupled, like monolithic kernels, put too many modules into the kernel, or too free, like exokernels, allow users to freely develop core features such as IPC, Virtual Memory, etc, or have no rules, like hybrid kernels, kernel modules organization is uncontrolled. In recent years, to solve these problems, resource management concept frequently appears in industry and academia. Although resource management concept makes resources in OSes orderly, no existing OSes or software systems can modify and extend management rules conveniently and dynamically.

This paper proposes a resource governance model that places resources such as applications and hardware into the model. Through unified rule governance, the organization of resources is more orderly and scalable. At the same time, by separating rules from resources, rules in the model are also scalable and flexible. Based on the model, we built Rhodes OS that allows users to modify and extend resource management rules by governance center which separates rules from resources. In addition, Rhodes also ensures the security of key resources in it and high performance of rule execution. We implemented Rhodes on x86-64 and evaluated it. Our evaluation results show that applications performance in Rhodes is equivalent to Linux in native mode. So we believe that OSes will enter resource governance age from resource management age in the near future.