I feel projects like MirageOS[0], Qubes OS[1], and unikernels in general are laying a lot of groundwork for interesting new developments in operating systems. And as a bonus, there's a lot more automated work on security and safety!
[0] https://mirage.io (and cool sub projects like running Mirage on a ESP32 with reprocessing to make a homebrew gameboy-like platform [0.1])
I’m stoked that unikernel papers are still popular (and there’s still a lot of unexplored territory), but it’s not exactly a groundbreaking area!
I share the original post’s sentiment about the lack of exciting operating systems research around topics outside of the standard areas like file systems, memory management, and security. Especially since these issues, for many people, are secondary to the perceived features of operating systems (like drivers and widget toolkits). I’d love, for example, to see some truly fresh ideas for new or different system calls (in addition to Fuchsia and Haiku).
If you're interested in contributing I'd look into it a little closer as I don't think containers align with the security model of Qubes. They'd rather support spinning up single container VMs which run separate Docker instances... probably not even in a Docker swarm due to the security channels that opens.
I feel projects like MirageOS[0], Qubes OS[1], and unikernels in general are laying a lot of groundwork for interesting new developments in operating systems. And as a bonus, there's a lot more automated work on security and safety!
[0] https://mirage.io (and cool sub projects like running Mirage on a ESP32 with reprocessing to make a homebrew gameboy-like platform [0.1])
[0.1] An operating system that can scale down to tiny platforms could be a lot of fun to homebrew tinkering https://twitter.com/cem2ran/status/1034879037758496772
[1] https://www.qubes-os.org