SIGOPS

Andrew is a distributed computing environment being developed in a joint project by Carnegie Mellon University and IBM. One of the major components of Andrew is a distributed file system which constitutes underlying mechanism for sharing information. ...

This paper describes a simple distributed mechanism for caching files among a networked collection of workstations. We have implemented it as part of Sprite, a new operating system being implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. A ...

The Butler system is a set of programs running on Andrew workstations at CMU that give users access to idle workstations. Current Andrew users use the system over 300 times per day. This paper describes the implementation of the Butler system and tells ...

Moving the contents of a large virtual address space stands out as the bottleneck in process migration, dominating all other costs and growing with the size of the program. Copy-on-reference shipment is shown to successfully attack this problem in the ...

Conventional algorithms to implement an Operating System timer module take Ο(n) time to start or maintain a timer, where n is the number of outstanding timers: this is expensive for large n. This paper begins by exploring the relationship between timer ...

Code to implement network protocols can be either inside the kernel of an operating system or in user-level processes. Kernel-resident code is hard to develop, debug, and maintain, but user-level implementations typically incur significant overhead and ...

A prototype implementation has been built as part of the Heterogeneous Computer Systems project at the University of Washington. This service supports RPC binding and other applications in our heterogeneous environment. Measurements of the performance ...

Mach is a multiprocessor operating system being implemented at Carnegie-Mellon University. An important component of the Mach design is the use of memory objects which can be managed either by the kernel or by user programs through a message interface. ...

This paper describes the Time Warp Operating System, under development for three years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Caltech Mark III Hypercube multi-processor. Its primary goal is concurrent execution of large, irregular discrete event ...

Formal specifications of operating system interfaces can be a useful part of their documentation. We illustrate this by documenting the Threads synchronization primitives of the Taos operating system. We start with an informal description, present a way ...

The Etherphone™ system was developed at Xerox PARC to explore methods of integrating voice into existing distributed personal computing environments. An important component of the Etherphone system, the voice manager, provides operations for recording, ...

The Emerald compiler analyzes object definitions and attempts to produce efficient implementations commensurate with the way in which objects are used. For example, an object that moves around the network will require a very general remote procedure ...

One price of extensibility and distribution, as implemented in QuickSilver, is a more complicated set of failure modes, and the consequent necessity of dealing with them. In traditional operating systems, services (e.g., file, display) are intrinsic ...

The IBM RT PC implements the necessary features of 801 storage architecture. The upper 4 bits of a 32-bit short address select one of 16 segment registers. A 12-bit segment id from the register replaces the 4 bits to form a 40-bit long virtual address. ...

Argus is a programming language and system developed to support the construction and execution of distributed programs. This paper describes the implementation of Argus, with particular emphasis on the way we implement atomic actions, because this is ...

We describe applications of a virtually synchronous environment for distributed programming, which underlies a collection of distributed programming tools in the ISIS² system. A virtually synchronous environment allows processes to be structured into ...

A log service provides efficient storage and retrieval of data that is written sequentially (append-only) and not subsequently modified. Application programs and subsystems use log services for recovery, to record security audit trails, and for ...

This paper describes a technique for implementing the sort of small databases that frequently occur in the design of operating systems and distributed systems. We take advantage of the existence of very large virtual memories, and quite large real ...

The workstation file system for the Cedar programming environment was modified to improve its robustness and performance. Previously, the file system used hardware-provided labels on disk blocks to increase robustness against hardware and software ...