The Aurora Operating System Revisiting the Single Level Store Emil Tsalapatis Ryan Hancock Tavian Barnes RCS Lab, University of Waterloo RCS Lab, University of Waterloo RCS Lab, University of Waterloo
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Ali José Mashtizadeh RCS Lab, University of Waterloo
[email protected] ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Applications on modern operating systems manage their single level stores, transparent persistence, snapshots, check- ephemeral state in memory, and persistent state on disk. En- point/restore suring consistency between them is a source of significant developer effort, yet still a source of significant bugs inma- ACM Reference Format: ture applications. We present the Aurora single level store Emil Tsalapatis, Ryan Hancock, Tavian Barnes, and Ali José Mash- (SLS), an OS that simplifies persistence by automatically per- tizadeh. 2021. The Aurora Operating System: Revisiting the Single sisting all traditionally ephemeral application state. With Level Store. In Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS recent storage hardware like NVMe SSDs and NVDIMMs, ’21), June 1-June 3, 2021, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, Aurora is able to continuously checkpoint entire applications USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3458336.3465285 with millisecond granularity. Aurora is the first full POSIX single level store to han- dle complex applications ranging from databases to web 1 INTRODUCTION browsers. Moreover, by providing new ways to interact with Single level storage (SLS) systems provide persistence of and manipulate application state, it enables applications to applications as an operating system service. Their advantage provide features that would otherwise be prohibitively dif- lies in removing the semantic gap between the in-memory ficult to implement.