The Persistent Relevance of the Local Operating System
to Global Applications
Jay Lepreau, Bryan Ford, and Mike Hibler
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
{lepreau,baford,mike}@cs.utah.edu
Abstract
The growth and popularity of loosely-coupled distributed systems
such as the World Wide Web and the touting of Java-based systems
as the solution to the issues of software maintenance, flexibility, and
security are changing the research emphasis away from
traditional single node operating system issues.
Apparently, the view is that traditional OS issues are either solved problems
or minor problems.
By contrast, we believe that building such vast distributed systems upon the
fragile infrastructure provided by today's operating systems is analogous
to building castles on sand. In this paper we outline the supporting arguments
for these views and describe an
OS design that
supports secure encapsulation of the foreign processes that will
be increasingly prevalent in tomorrow's distributed systems.
Full paperpresented at and
appears in
Proc. of the Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop,
September 1996.