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The V distributed system

Published: 01 March 1988 Publication History

Abstract

The V distributed System was developed at Stanford University as part of a research project to explore issues in distributed systems. Aspects of the design suggest important directions for the design of future operating systems and communication systems.

References

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Christopher John Gintz

This authoritative and concise report summarizes the findings of the V distributed operating system project at Stanford University. The V distributed system project was developed to explore directions for the future design of integrated operating and communication systems. The focus of V is the interrelationship of operating system and communication tasks, namely I/O, memory management, naming, and interprocess communication. Unlike operating system designers of the past, the V system designers used a hardware model (backplane design) as a basis for constructing a software model. This model has three tenets: (1) high-performance communication is the most critical facility for distributed systems; (2) the protocols, not the software, define the system; and (3) a relatively small operating system kernel can implement the basic protocols and services, providing a simple network-transparent process, address space, and communication model. Unlike many writers on this subject, the author presents a readable, straightforward analysis of the real problems associated with software system design. Cheriton's report discusses the approaches that work and those that failed. This paper should be of interest to both academics and practicing engineers who are interested in some of the current theoretical research dealing with the design of networks as a system.

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 31, Issue 3
March 1988
111 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/42392
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 1988
Published in CACM Volume 31, Issue 3

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