A Caching Model of Operating System Kernel Functionality

David R. Cheriton and Kenneth Duda

One-line summary: Scheduler activations part II, the micro-kernel.

Overview/Main Points

Conclusions

The trend towards application-specific customizability is a good thing. This paper offers another variation on this theme, offering the capability to switch between/cache application kernels, threads, and address spaces.

The authors criticize micro-kernel OSs and point out the language dependence of SPIN and Aegis, but leave out performance comparisons to justify their statements. It would seem that they would suffer from the same problems with hardware support (They criticize microkernels for their hardware support, but then state that they only I/O that they support is high-speed networking!?). I also do not buy that their support for different policies is much different from features such as micro-kernel user-level virtual memory support.


Back to index