Assorted pointers:<p><a href="http://danluu.com/clwb-pcommit/" rel="nofollow">http://danluu.com/clwb-pcommit/</a> on the speed of modern persistent storage and the need to get the OS out of the way for best performance<p><a href="http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/02/custom-stack-it-goes-to-11.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/02/custom-stack-it-goes-to-11...</a> on the speed of modern networking and the need to get the OS out of the way for best performance<p><a href="http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/12/19/safe-native-code/" rel="nofollow">http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/12/19/safe-native-code/</a> and the rest of that blog on Microsoft Research's Midori research OS, based on C# and type safety rather than traditional process-based (i.e. Memory Mapping Unit-based) security<p><a href="https://sel4.systems/" rel="nofollow">https://sel4.systems/</a> for a proven-secure (with many asterisks) native-code microkernel<p>MirageOS (OCaml) and similar (often Rust-based) unikernels<p>... and of course, the rise of the heavyweight microkernel under the name "hypervisor"<p>Each of these ideas has very serious downsides, but each also has earnest proponents.