Mind the Gap: Reconnecting Architecture and OS Research.

The goal of a computer system is to run an application workload securely, reliably, efficiently, and fast. A computer's hardware architecture and operating system exist to support this goal, and it would be nice if they cooperated as effectively as possible. Yet there is a growing gap between architectural research and OS research, which seems to be the result of poor communication about what actually matters. In this paper, we discuss this gap and what to do about it. We illustrate the opportunities for closing the gap using examples from some recent OS research.