PhD Thesis: Speculative Execution Within A Commodity Operating System

Commodity operating systems are traditionally tuned to improve performance, but in the pursuit of faster operation, reliability is sacrificed. Application developers are currently provided with \either/or” abstractions that force them to choose between a fast and unreliable abstraction (which requires them to implement a guarantee within an application) or an abstraction that is slow but safe. Therefore, common abstractions, such as asynchronous file system I/O, explicitly relax reliability guarantees (e.g., delay writes to disk by 30 seconds) in favor of better performance.