ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

Levy, Hank

doi: 10.1145/382244.382245pmid: N/A

Cabrera, Luis-Felipe

doi: 10.1145/382244.382829pmid: N/A

Antonov, Vadim G.

doi: 10.1145/382244.382830pmid: N/A

This paper describes an object-oriented operating system with regular architecture and minimal functionally complete set of primitives. It also considers the possibility of implementation of efficient system with this architecture on von Neumann machines.

Tam, Ming-Chit; Smith, Jonathan M.; Farber, David J.

doi: 10.1145/382244.382831pmid: N/A

Two possible modes of Input/Output (I/O)are "sequential" and "random-access", and there is an extremely strong conceptual link between I/O and communication. Sequential communication, typified in the I/O setting by magnetic tape, is typified in the communication setting by a stream , e.g., a UNIX 1 pipe. Random-access communication, typified in the I/O setting by a drum or disk device, is typified in the communication setting by shared memory . In this paper, we study and survey the extension of the random-access model to distributed computer systems. A Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is a memory area shared by processes running on computers connected by a network. DSM provides direct system support of the shared memory programming model. When assisted by hardware, it can also provide a low-overhead interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism to software. Shared pages are migrated on demand between the hosts. Since computer network latency is typically much larger than that of a shared bus, caching in DSM is necessary for performance. We use caching and issues such as address space structure and page replacement schemes to define a taxonomy. Based on the taxonomy we examine three DSM efforts in detail, namely: IVY, Clouds and MemNet.

Tay, B. H.; Ananda, A. L.

doi: 10.1145/382244.382832pmid: N/A

The Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a popular paradigm for inter-process communication (IPC) between processes in different computers across the network. It is widely used in various Distributed Systems. Although it is conceptually simple and straightforward to implement, there are a lot of different and subtle issues involved which result different RPC implementations. In this paper, various distinctive RPC implementations are surveyed, analyzed and compared: Xerox Courier RPC, Xerox Cedar RPC, Sun ONC/RPC, Apollo NCA/RPC, Cambridge Mayflower Project RPC, MIT Athena Project RPC, Stanford Modula/V RPC, and Rajdoot RPC are presented. The design objectives, features provided, call semantics, orphan treatment, binding, transport protocols supported, security/authentication, data representation and application programming interface of these RPCs are examined.