This paper describes the motivation, architecture and performance of SPIN, an extensible operating system.

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In previous work, we presented a domain-specific version of C, called C4, which was used for capturing extensions to the Linux 2.6 kernel using AOSD techniques as an alternative to the conventional patching approach [10,19]. The focus of that work was on introducing new extensions represented as aspects in system software such as the Linux kernel with a focus on readablility, compatibility, performance, and the preservation of existing development workflows. However, other AOSD researchers (e.g. Lohmann et al. [8]) state that "… Linux, as a monolithic system, provides a low number of join-points for aspects and that those available were semantically ambiguous." This worrisome statement motivated us to study the feasibility of applying AOSD techniques to refactor existing Linux kernel extensions. To gain insight we analyzed the AOSD-ness of a large number of configurable options available in the Linux kernel and evaluated whether they could be converted into aspects-and for the AOSD fan the preliminary results are promising.

Hypervisors, popularized by Xen and VMware, are quickly becoming commodity. They are appropriate for many usage scenarios, but there are scenarios that require system virtualization with high degrees of both isolation and efficiency. Examples include HPC clusters, the Grid, hosting centers, and PlanetLab. We present an alternative to hypervisors that is better suited to such scenarios. The approach is a synthesis of prior work on resource containers and security containers applied to general-purpose, timeshared operating systems. Examples of such container-based systems include Solaris 10, Virtuozzo for Linux, and Linux-VServer. As a representative instance of container-based systems, this paper describes the design and implementation of Linux-VServer. In addition, it contrasts the architecture of Linux-VServer with current generations of Xen, and shows how Linux-VServer provides comparable support for isolation and superior system efficiency.