Alain Tchana

MiLK: The key to addressing operating system flexibility and velocity

Over the last decade, the exponential progression of digital technology in our societies (health, politics, security, transport, entertainment, etc.) has resulted in the appearance of a large diversity of applications and hardware supports that the operating system (OS) must consider. Considering these environments, the OS (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and Windows) is a "catch-all", making it difficult to maintain, vulnerable, and sub-optimal. A better approach would be to have a customizable OS, but with today's OS, this is arduous, not within reach of sysadmins, and requires rebooting the machine, leading to service unavailability.

The fundamental problem of popular OSes is their monolithic nature, which enforces the execution of all their services in kernel space, where customization is intricate. How can the services of monolithic OSes be easily and quickly customize and deploy with zero downtime?

Alain Tchana leads MiLK, a research project which resurrects microkernels. MilK advocates outsourcing Linux services to userspace where quick customization and deployment are conceivable. MiLK opts for a pragmatic approach, transforming Linux (a popular monolithic OS) into a microkernalizable OS. Sysadmins will leverage the resulting OS to customize Linux services. In this talk, we will illustrate MiLK on memory management, a critical kernel sub-system.

 
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Biography

Alain Tchana is from Nkongsamba, a city in Cameroon. He is gratuated from University of Yaoundé I in 2008. Then he received his PhD in computer science in 2011 at Toulouse INP. Since September 2022 he is Professor at Grenoble INP in France. Before Grenoble, Alain Tchana was Assistant Professor at Toulouse INP (2013-2018), Professor at Nice University (2018-2019), and Professor at ENS Lyon (2019-2022). His main research interests are Virtualization and Operating Systems. Simply, Alain Tchana is a Systems guy! He has published more than 60 research papers in major Systems, Middleware, Network, and Security conferences including EuroSys, USENIX ATC, INFOCOM and DSN. He has also served as PC member in several conferences including USENIX ATC, EuroSys, NSDI. Alain Tchana has co-supervised several PhD students, six of whom are pursuing their career in academia. He has received two major prizes: the 2021 CNRS GDR RSD best junior researcher awards in France, and the 2021 Prix de la Francophonie pour Jeunes chercheurs. Since September 2023, Alain Tchana is member of ACM DEI Council.
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