Arrakis is a new operating system that is designed around recent application and hardware trends: Applications are becoming so complex that they are miniature operating systems in their own right and are hampered by the existing OS protection model. On the hardware side, virtualization technologies and I/O devices have become increasingly sophisticated and take on more and more functions traditionally carried out by the operating system.
In Arrakis, we ask the question whether we can remove the OS entirely from normal application execution. The OS only sets up the execution environment and interacts with an application in rare cases where resources need to be reallocated or name conflicts need to be resolved. The application gets the full power of the unmediated hardware, through an application-specific library linked into the application address space.