The case for application-specific operating systems
Anderson, T.E.
Workstation Operating Systems, 1992. Proceedings., Third Workshop on
Volume , Issue , 23-24 Apr 1992 Page(s):92 - 94
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/WWOS.1992.275682
Summary:Recent evidence suggests that trends will require rethinking the
traditional role of operating systems. The challenge to operating
systems designers is to deliver to applications the performance
available now only from dedicated hardware, combined with the ease of
sharing resources and data among multiple applications and the simpler
programming model found in general-purpose operating systems. An
application-specific structure is proposed where as much of the
operating system as possible is pushed into runtime library routines
linked with each application. The operating system kernel is stripped to
its bare minimum functionality. At a minimum, the kernel must adjudicate
among application requests for physical resources, and it must enforce
hardware protection boundaries by operating system code running as
library routines in each application. The key is that the operating
system must notify each application of changes in its resource
allocation, to allow the application on the chance to adapt to make best
use of whatever resources are available to it
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