Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture.

[shapj@us.ibm.com]

[Kai writes:]
>I've thought for a while I'd like to experiment with an OS where you had
>an OS boundary like this, but you could actually do IPC where you see an
>object in another process as such an OS handle. Of course, you'd need some
>kind of information on what the arguments look like so that the OS can
>actually move them to the other process, and it should still be efficient.

Kai: go grab a copy of EROS from the website at www.eros-os.org.  This is
exactly how EROS is structured.  In the EROS case, the kernel moves a sequential
byte range; the kernel itself knows nothing of argument structure.

>And I see no reason why one
>couldn't build a perfectly compatible POSIX environment on top of that.

One can -- a POSIX environment in fact existed on KeyKOS, the predecessor of
EROS.


Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph. D.
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Email: shapj@us.ibm.com
Phone: +1 914 784 7085  (Tieline: 863)
Fax: +1 914 784 7595