TL;DR: A distributed relational database that provides an OS like interface can provide a fantastic foundation for the next generation of applications that need to be multi-node. DBOS is built on VoltDB (a distributed database) on top of Linux. DBOS will provide a platform that will expose IPC, a Filesystem, Scheduling etc. that multi-node applications can run on. Many interesting things will be done via simple SQL!

The paper is a good read: it's quite high level and written in a simple, direct language.

There are some "this is cool" moments in the paper -- such as when it explains how IPC messaging is done. You simply need to insert your message to the appropriate SQL table with the receiver_id of the receiver! The underlying RDMBS is distributed. Each table is hash partitioned on a key and here the key is receiver_id itself. So if receiver_id hashes to a different node than the current one, DBOS will transparently "send" the message to the other node by doing the usual distributed DBMS stuff.

This smells like the future. However the choice of VoltDB as the base db seems like a fatal choice. I'm sure VoltDB is great but it's a commercial product and the community edition is licensed as Affero GPL.

Maybe I'm spoiled but an OS in 2022 that would like to be mass adopted needs to have fully open source foundation. After Linux no one wants to go back to the days of proprietary OSes even if they are path breaking in some ways.