Application of Meta-Protocols to Improve OS Services Douglas B. Orr Department of Computer Science University of Utah March, 1995 AbstractUser control of the implementation of OS services is the target of many current OS research efforts. The majority of these efforts require the OS to be substantially modified to expose its previously internal interfaces, with applications modified to reference these interfaces. Recent work in languages has centered on the use of meta-protocols to improve application implementations. Meta-protocols are application protocols that specify how an application works, as opposed to what the application does. Meta-protocols permit application implementations to be specialized to their expected operating conditions, eliminating OS provisions for uncommon or impossible cases. We believe these specializations will result in significant performance improvements, transparent to the application. We present a set of tools for realizing this per-application specialization.
Full paper presented at and appears in Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, IEEE, May 1995.