105,491 research outputs found
Process Management in Distributed Operating Systems
As part of designing and building the Amoeba distributed operating system, we have come up with a simple set of mechanisms for process management that allows downloading process migration, checkpointing, remote debugging and emulation of alien operating system interfaces.\ud
The basic process management facilities are realized by the Amoeba Kernel and can be augmented by user-space services: Debug Service, Load-Balancing Service, Unix-Emulation Service, Checkpoint Service, etc.\ud
The Amoeba Kernel can produce a representation of the state of a process which can be given to another Kernel where it is accepted for continued execution. This state consists of the memory contents in the form of a collection of segments, and a Process Descriptor which contains the additional state, program counters, stack pointers, system call state, etc.\ud
Careful separation of mechanism and policy has resulted in a compact set of Kernel operations for process creation and management. A collection of user-space services provides process management policies and a simple interface for application programs.\ud
In this paper we shall describe the mechanisms as they are being implemented in the Amoeba Distributed System at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. We believe that the mechanisms described here can also apply to other distributed systems
Mobile object location discovery in unpredictable environments
Emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing environments present hard challenges to software engineering. The use of mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifing software development for these environments. However, the task of discovering mobile code location becomes a problem in unpredictable environments when using existing strategies, designed with fixed and relatively stable networks in mind. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile code platform augmented with a structured overlay network. We demonstrate how the location discovery strategy of AMOS has better reliability and scalability properties than existing approaches, with minimal communication overhead. Finally, we demonstrate how AMOS can provide autonomous distribution of effort fairly throughout a network using probabilistic methods that requires no global knowledge of host capabilities
RAFDA: A Policy-Aware Middleware Supporting the Flexible Separation of Application Logic from Distribution
Middleware technologies often limit the way in which object classes may be
used in distributed applications due to the fixed distribution policies that
they impose. These policies permeate applications developed using existing
middleware systems and force an unnatural encoding of application level
semantics. For example, the application programmer has no direct control over
inter-address-space parameter passing semantics. Semantics are fixed by the
distribution topology of the application, which is dictated early in the design
cycle. This creates applications that are brittle with respect to changes in
distribution. This paper explores technology that provides control over the
extent to which inter-address-space communication is exposed to programmers, in
order to aid the creation, maintenance and evolution of distributed
applications. The described system permits arbitrary objects in an application
to be dynamically exposed for remote access, allowing applications to be
written without concern for distribution. Programmers can conceal or expose the
distributed nature of applications as required, permitting object placement and
distribution boundaries to be decided late in the design cycle and even
dynamically. Inter-address-space parameter passing semantics may also be
decided independently of object implementation and at varying times in the
design cycle, again possibly as late as run-time. Furthermore, transmission
policy may be defined on a per-class, per-method or per-parameter basis,
maximizing plasticity. This flexibility is of utility in the development of new
distributed applications, and the creation of management and monitoring
infrastructures for existing applications.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200
Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware
We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications,
middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we
present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework
suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This
framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications.
The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide
range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich
contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely
how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the
middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression
of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and
altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The
framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be
configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM
SAC 200
Process migration in UNIX environments
To support process migration in UNIX environments, the main problem is how to encapsulate the location dependent features of the system in such a way that a host independent virtual environment is maintained by the migration handlers on the behalf of each migrated process. An object-oriented approach is used to describe the interaction between a process and its environment. More specifically, environmental objects were introduced in UNIX systems to carry out the user-environment interaction. The implementation of the migration handlers is based on both the state consistency criterion and the property consistency criterion
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