Unifying synchronization and events in a multicore OS

In this paper, we argue that an operating system structured as a distributed system needs a coordination and a name service to make OS services work correctly. While a distributed structure allows applying algorithms from the distributed field, it also suffers from similar problems like synchronization, naming, distributed locking and coordination of service instances. Octopus, our solution to this problem in the context of a real OS, provides an easy-to-use, high-level, uniform coordination service with events at reasonable performance. Based on this service, we describe three real use cases: device management, OS service registry and boot-up coordination.