Technical reports
Evolution of operating system structures
March 1989, 28 pages
DOI: 10.48456/tr-166
Abstract
The development of structuring within operating systems is reviewed and related to the simultaneous evolution of concurrent programming languages. First traditional, multi-user systems are considered and their evolution from monolithic closed systems to general domain structured systems is traced. Hardware support for protected sharing is emphasised for this type of system.
The technology directed trend towards single user workstations requires a different emphasis in system design. The requirement for protection in such systems is less strong than in multi-user systems and, in a single language system, may to some extent be provided by software at compile time rather than hardware at run time. Distributed systems comprising single user workstations and dedicated server machines are considered and the special requirements for efficient implementation of servers are discussed.
The concepts of closed but structured and open system designs are helpful. It is argued that the open approach is most suited to the requirements of single user and distributed systems. Experiences of attempting to implement systems over a closed operating system base are presented.
Progress towards support for heterogeneity in distributed systems, so that interacting components written in a range of languages may interwork and may run on a variety of hardware, is presented.
The benefits of taking an object orientated view for system-level as well as language-level objects and for specification, generation and design of systems are discussed and work in this area is described.
An outline of formal approaches aimed at specification, verification and automatic generation of software is given.
Finally, design issues are summarised and conclusions drawn.
Full text
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BibTeX record
@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-166,
author = {Bacon, Jean},
title = {{Evolution of operating system structures}},
year = 1989,
month = mar,
url = {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-166.pdf},
institution = {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
doi = {10.48456/tr-166},
number = {UCAM-CL-TR-166}
}