Scriptable operating systems with Lua

Abstract

Extensible operating system is a design based on the idea that operating systems can be adapted to meet user requirements by allowing user extensions. In a different scenario, that of application development, there is a paradigm that supports that complex systems should allow users to write scripts to tailor an application to their needs. In this paper we propose the concept of scriptable operating system, which applies scripting development paradigm to the concept of extensible operating systems. Scriptable operating systems support that operating systems can adequately provide extensibility by allowing users to script their kernel. We also present an implementation of a kernel-scripting environment that allows users to dynamically extend Linux and NetBSD operating systems using the scripting language Lua. To evaluate this environment, we extended both OS kernels to allow users to script CPU frequency scaling and network packet filtering using Lua.