To exploit the high performance afforded by the hardware, applications must be allowed to customize the operating system according to their needs. A pertinent question is: What interface should the operating system kernel provide to the user-level code? This interface should be efficient, extensible, and safe, but need not provide high-level abstractions. Abstractions and policies are better le...

The majority of processors produced nowadays are targeted at dedicated computing systems that execute either a single application or a small set of previously known applications. In contrast to generic computing systems, these dedicated systems have very specific run-time support requirements, which are not properly fulfilled by general-purpose operating systems. The impossibility to anticipate...