Description:

However, existing general-purpose operating systems do not provide adequate support for these modern applications. These operating systems were designed over two decades ago, when garbage-collected applications were not prevalent and users interacted with systems using consoles and command lines, rather than graphical user interfaces. As a result, they fail to allow necessary coordinations among resource management components to ensure consistent performance guarantees. For example, garbage-collected applications cannot adjust themselves to maintain high throughput under dynamic memory pressure, simply because existing virtual memory managers do not collect and expose enough information to them. Furthermore, despite the increasing demand of supporting co-existing interactive applications in desktop environment, resource managers (especially memory and disk I/O) mostly focus on optimizing throughput. They each work independently, ignoring the response time requirements that the CPU scheduler attempts to satisfy. Consequently, pressure on any of these resources can significantly degrade application responsiveness.