Designing meta-interfaces for object-oriented operating systems

Modern multimedia applications place ever-growing performance and flexibility demands on operating systems. Unfortunately, many existing operating systems are inflexible; because of their monolithic nature, they cannot be easily changed to accommodate these demands. Some flexibility can be gained by decomposing such monolithic systems into microkernels and user-level components. Creating and modifying these components, however remains complicated, and the performance overhead is often high. Alternatively, flexibility can be gained by linking extensions directly into the kernel. This usually preserves performance but much ingenuity is required to prevent new code from corrupting existing components, and to remove old code when it is no longer needed. The incorporation of meta-objects, meta-spaces and meta-interfaces into flexible operating systems offers promising solutions to these problems.