Call-for-Papers
With unix.next, we are trying to explore and assess developments in and ideas for the future of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. We intend to bring together people from many different backgrounds - the commercial Unix industry, companies involved in open source, academics working on open source system software, and – last, but not least – the traditional open source "hobby" developer.
Here, we understand "unix" in the title in a very wide sense - we welcome contributions from kernel developers, userland infrastructure and distribution developers and maintainers, virtualization research and engineering, graphical user interfaces, networking, security researchers and practitioners, hardware developers and many more.
This first edition of unix.next will be organized as a workshop and serves to explore and refine the format of the event for upcoming yearly conferences.
One inspiration for unix.next is a pivoting point in the mid 1990s at which several transitions took place - the proliferation of open source systems, the increased relevance of the x86 architecture, the availability of 64-bit processors as well as affordable multiprocessor systems. All of these had significant impact on the development of Unix-like systems, as described in Vahalia's and Schimmel's texts from that era [1,2].
Nowadays, new challenges not only involve novel hardware developments, such as asymmetric architectures, GPGPU integration, remote memory access, large-scale systems and virtualization. Today, the reach of Unix has extended into many more areas from embedded and mobile systems to High-Performance and Cloud Computing. Here, challenges such as user- friendlyness, energy awareness, scalability and maintainability affect all layers of Unix system development.
Thus, a central conjoining interest for unix.next are these challenges awaiting system developers, maintainers, administrators, and researchers today and a discussion of existing and envisioned solutions. We are excited to hear about your ideas and proposals for talks, demonstrations, and discussion rounds.
[1] Uresh Vahalia, UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers, Prentice-Hall 1996, ISBN 0-13-101908-2
[2] Curt Schimmel, UNIX Systems for New Architectures, Addison-Wesley 1994, ISBN 0-201-63338-8