Journal of Operating Systems Development & Trends

Journal of Operating Systems Development & Trends

• Operating system architecture and kernel design: monolithic, microkernel, hybrid, and unikernel architectures, kernel modularity and extensibility, system call interfaces and boundary design, kernel programming language choices including memory-safe implementations, and formal verification of kernel components.
• Process and thread management: process creation and lifecycle, thread models and lightweight threading, user-level versus kernel-level threading, thread-level speculation and automatic parallelisation, context switching cost, and process isolation mechanisms.
• Scheduling: general-purpose and fair-share scheduling algorithms, real-time and deadline-driven scheduling, multicore and heterogeneous core scheduling, energy-aware scheduling policies, interactive responsiveness versus throughput trade-offs, and scheduler evaluation methodology.
• Memory management: virtual memory and paging policies, address translation and TLB behaviour, huge pages and memory compaction, non-uniform memory access management, persistent memory support, memory overcommit and reclamation, and allocator design.
• Concurrency and synchronisation: locking primitives and lock-free algorithms, memory consistency and barriers, inter-process and inter-thread communication mechanisms, message passing and shared memory models, deadlock detection and avoidance, and scalability of synchronisation under high core counts.
• File systems and storage: file system design and on-disk layout, journaling, copy-on-write, and crash consistency, virtual file system interfaces, storage stack and block layer design, flash and NVMe-aware file systems, distributed and network file systems, and data integrity mechanisms.
• Virtualisation and containers: hypervisor architecture and paravirtualisation, hardware-assisted virtualisation, container runtimes and namespace and cgroup isolation, lightweight virtual machines, live migration, nested virtualisation, and comparative overhead analysis.
• Real-time and embedded operating systems: real-time kernel design and latency bounds, worst-case execution time and predictability, mixed-criticality system support, integration of hard real-time and multimedia workloads, quality of service degradation under overload, and embedded and IoT operating system footprints.
• Distributed and cloud system software: operating system support for cloud workloads, cluster and node resource management, serverless runtime design and cold start behaviour, orchestration-layer interaction with the kernel, and system software for disaggregated resources.
• Operating system security: privilege separation and capability systems, mandatory access control frameworks, secure boot and integrity measurement, trusted execution environments and confidential computing, kernel vulnerability classes and exploit mitigation, sandboxing, and isolation failure analysis.
• Device drivers and input/output: driver architecture and safety, interrupt handling and polling trade-offs, direct memory access and zero-copy paths, user-space drivers and kernel bypass, device virtualisation, and support for accelerators and specialised hardware.
• Performance evaluation and instrumentation: benchmarking methodology for system software, tracing and profiling frameworks, in-kernel programmability and observability, workload characterisation, bottleneck analysis, and reproducibility of systems measurements.
• Energy and thermal management: power-aware kernel policies, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling control, idle state management, energy accounting and attribution, and thermal throttling behaviour.
• User interfaces and system services: windowing and display system architecture, graphical interface design and usability at the system level, system service and daemon design, init and service management, and accessibility support in system software.