Department of Computer Science and Technology

Technical reports

The structure of a multi-service operating system

Timothy Roscoe

August 1995, 113 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted April 1995 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Queens’ College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-376

Abstract

Increases in processor speed and network bandwidth have led to workstations being used to process multimedia data in real time. These applications have requirements not met by existing operating systems, primarily in the area of resource control: there is a need to reserve resources, in particular the processor, at a fine granularity. Furthermore, guarantees need to be dynamically renegotiated to allow users to reassign resources when the machine is heavily loaded. There have been few attempts to provide the necessary facilities in traditional operating systems, and the internal structure of such systems makes the implementation of useful resource control difficult.

This dissertation presents a way of structuring an operating system to reduce crosstalk between applications sharing the machine, and enable useful resource guarantees to be made: instead of system services being located in the kernel or server processes, they are placed as much as possible in client protection domains and scheduled as part of the client, with communication between domains only occurring when necessary to enforce protection and concurrency control. This amounts to multiplexing the service at as low a level of abstraction as possible. A mechanism for sharing processor time between resources is also described. The prototype Nemesis operating system is used to demonstrate the ideas in use in a practical system, and to illustrate solutions to several implementation problems that arise.

Firstly, structuring tools in the form of typed interfaces within a single address space are used to reduce the complexity of the system from the programmer’s viewpoint and enable rich sharing of text and data between applications.

Secondly, a scheduler is presented which delivers useful Quality of Service guarantees to applications in a highly efficient manner. Integrated with the scheduler is an inter-domain communication system which has minimal impact on resource guarantees, and a method of decoupling hardware interrupts from the execution of device drivers.

Finally, a framework for high-level inter-domain and inter-machine communication is described, which goes beyond object-based RPC systems to permit both Quality of Service negotiation when a communication binding is established, and services to be implemented straddling protection domain boundaries as well as locally and in remote processes.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-376,
  author =	 {Roscoe, Timothy},
  title = 	 {{The structure of a multi-service operating system}},
  year = 	 1995,
  month = 	 aug,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-376.ps.gz},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-376},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-376}
}