From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 5 11:43:33 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA00756 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 11:43:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from picnic.mat.net (picnic.mat.net [206.246.122.117]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA00733 for ; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 11:43:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from chuckr@mat.net) Received: from localhost (chuckr@localhost) by picnic.mat.net (8.9.1/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA17276; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 14:41:58 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 14:41:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey To: Niall Smart cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MIT Exokernel OS In-Reply-To: <98Oct5.182253bst.19713@gateway.euristix.ie> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Niall Smart wrote: > This looks interesting: > > MIT Exokernel Operating System > > An operating system is interposed between applications and the > physical hardware. Therefore, its structure has a dramatic impact on > the performance and the scope of applications that can be built on > it. Since its inception, the field of operating systems has been > attempting to identify an appropriate structure: previous attempts > include the familiar monolithic and micro-kernel operating systems > as well as more exotic language-based and virtual machine operating > systems. Exokernels dramatically depart from this previous work. An > exokernel eliminates the notion that an operating system should > provide abstractions on which applications are built. Instead, it > concentrates solely on securely multiplexing the raw hardware: from > basic hardware primitives, application-level libraries and servers > can directly implement traditional operating system abstractions, > specialized for appropriateness and speed. > > http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/exo/ The nice thing to see is that they compare, on the web page above, the performance of their ExOS system with FreeBSD amd OpenBSD as benchmarks. It's interesting in it's own right, but this is very nice to see. ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@glue.umd.edu | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run Journey2 and picnic (FreeBSD-current) (301) 220-2114 | and jaunt (NetBSD). ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message