POSIX Has Become Outdated VAGGELIS ATLIDAKIS, JEREMY ANDRUS, ROXANA GEAMBASU, DIMITRISSYSTEMS MITROPOULOS, AND JASON NIEH Vaggelis Atlidakis is a PhD he POSIX standard for APIs was developed over 25 years ago. We student in the Department of explored how applications in Android, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux use Computer Science at Columbia these interfaces today and found that weaknesses or deficiencies in University. His research T interests revolve around broad POSIX have led to divergence in how modern applications use the POSIX areas of computer systems, including operating APIs. In this article, we present our analysis of over a million applications systems, security and privacy, and applications and show how developers have created workarounds to shortcut POSIX and of machine learning to systems. implement functionality missing from POSIX.
[email protected] The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is the IEEE standard operating system Jeremy Andrus holds a PhD in (OS) service interface for UNIXbased systems. It describes a set of fundamental abstrac operating systems and mobile tions needed for efficient construction of applications. Since its creation over 25 years ago, computing from Columbia POSIX has evolved to some extent (e.g., the most recent update was published in 2013 [9]), University and currently but the changes have been small overall. Meanwhile, applications and the computing plat works as a Kernel Engineering forms they run on have changed dramatically: modern applications for today’s smartphones, Manager at Apple.
[email protected] desktop PCs, and tablets interact with multiple layers of software frameworks and libraries implemented atop the OS. Roxana Geambasu is an Although POSIX continues to serve as the single standardized interface between these soft Assistant Professor of ware frameworks and the OS, little has been done to measure whether POSIX abstractions Computer Science at Columbia are effective in supporting modern application workloads, or whether new, nonstandard University.