Smarter Operating Systems Will Use Wasm - The Coming OS Revolution

Jonas Kruckenberg - k23

Operating systems are the ultimate generic challenge: They have to run on a wide variety of hardware and support a multitude of programs. This puts them in the awkward position of being very conservative and making less ideal decisions in the name of portability, reliability, and security.

k23 started with the realization that WASM allows us to flip the script on this, though: By embedding a WASM just-in-time compiler directly into a microkernel, we can aggressively optimize components for the hardware at hand and tune memory allocations to the running programs. We can also be much more helpful, automatically checking for use-after-free bugs, printing stack traces, snapshotting application state, tracing program execution, and more.

In my talk, I want to present k23, how strong isolation and capability-based security lead to more secure software, how embedded JIT compilers lead to a more performant and helpful OS, and talk about what the future might hold.

Slides