Electrical computers and digital processing systems: interprogra – Miscellaneous
Reexamination Certificate
1999-03-31
2004-04-27
Courtenay, III, St. John (Department: 2126)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: interprogra
Miscellaneous
C718S100000, C719S331000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06728963
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Technical Field
The invention is related to computer operating systems and in particular to a computer operating system which is highly componentized and has dynamically loadable operating features which may be loaded and unloaded during system run time.
2. Background Art
The progressive computerization of society involves a number of diverse computing platforms beside the general-purpose computer:
Embedded control systems, including consumer devices, intelligent sensors and smart home controls.
Communication-oriented devices such as digital cell phones and networking infrastructure.
Programmable peripherals and microcontrollers.
In all these cases, the general-purpose platform approach is either not applicable, or it is prohibitively expensive. The microprocessor might be a DSP, a VLIW, or a micro-controller; the memory budget is severely restricted; there might be no MMU; the network connection might be sporadic; and Real-Time support is essential.
Current operating systems are either inflexible, big, lack Real-Time support, have complex hardware requirements, or are so special purpose that good development tools are unavailable and code reusability is low.
Microkernels [Black92, Engler95] attempt to modularize the operating system. But they confuse modularity with security by mandating that system services be in separate address spaces. Many of the services moved into separate server processes are still necessary for these systems to function and often the services have to trust each other.
C++ and Java provide objects at a very fine granularity level, and they are extremely successful with application programmers. Unfortunately, both languages confine their objects to a single address space. Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) [Brockschmidt95] and other similar systems extend objects across address spaces and across machine boundaries. OLE seamlessly integrates independently developed components. When editing an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document it is in fact the Excel process that operates on objects inside of Word's address space. Unfortunately, it only works for user mode applications.
Modularity has always been an important paradigm in software design. By breaking a complex system into pieces, the complexity becomes more manageable. Address spaces provide security by installing virtual-memory based firewalls between applications. These two issues are orthogonal, but the distinction has been lost in systems research that has been concentrating on so-called microkernels. These issues have been discussed in the following publications:
[Bershad95] Brian Bershad, S. Savage, P. Pardyak, E. G. Sirer, M. Fiuczynski, D. Becker, S. Eggers, C. Chambers.
Extensibility, safety and performance in the Spin operating system
. In 15
th
ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 267-284, Copper Mountain Resort, Colo., December 1995.
[Black92] David Black, David Golub, Daniel Julin, Richard Rashid, Richard Draves, Randall Dean, Alessandro Forin, Joseph Barrera, Hideyuki Tokuda, Gerald Malan, David Bohman.
Microkernel Operating System Architecture and Mach
. In 1
st
USENIX Workshop on Micro-kernels and Other Kernel Architectures, pages 11-30, Seattle, April 1992.
[Brockschmidt95] K. Brockshmidt.
Inside OLE, Second ed
. Microsoft Press, Redmond Wash., 1995.
[Cheriton94] David Cheriton, Kenneth Duda.
A Caching Model of Operating System Kernel Functionality
. In 1
st
Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, Seattle, 1994.
[Cheriton88] David Cheriton.
The V distributed system
. In Communications of the ACM, pages 314-333, March 1988.
[Draves97] Richard Draves, Scott Cutshall.
Unifying the User and Kernel Environments
. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-97-10, 16 pages, March 1997
[Engler95] D. R. Engler, M. F. Kaashoek, J. O' Toole Jr. Exokernel:
an operating system architecture for application
-
specific resource management
. In 15
th
ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 251-266, Copper Mountain Resort, Colo., December 1995.
[Ford97] Bryan Ford, Godmar Back, Greg Benson, Jay Lepreau, Albert Lin, Olin Shivers.
The Flux OSKit: A Substrate for Kernel and Language Research
. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 38-51. ACM SIGOPS, Saint-Malo, France, October 1997.
[Golub90] David Golub, Randall Dean, Alessandro Forin, Richard Rashid. UNIX as an application program. In USENIX 1990 Summer Conference, pages 87-95, June 1990.
[Helander94] Johannes Helander. Unix under Mach:
The Lites Server
. Master's thesis, 71 pages, Helsinki University of Technology, 1994. Available from http://www.cs.hut.fi/~jvh/lites.MASTERS.ps
[Hildebrand92] D. Hildebrand.
An architectural overview of QNX
. In
1
st
USENIX Workshop on Micro-kernels and Other Kernel Architectures, pages 113-126, Seattle, April 1992.
[ISI95] Integrated Systems Inc.
pSOSystem System Concepts
. Part No. COL0011, May 1995, ISI, Sunnyvale Calif.
[Jones96] Michael B. Jones, Joseph S. Barrera, III, Richard P. Draves, Alessandro Forin, Paul J. Leach, Gilad Odinak.
An Overview of the Rialto Real Time Architecture
. In Proceedings of the 7
th
ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, pagg. 249-256, September 1996.
[Jones97] Michael B. Jones et al.
CPU Reservations and Time Constraints: Efficient, Predictable Scheduling of Independent Activities
. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 198-211. ACM SIGOPS, Saint-Malo, France, October 1997.
[Jones 97b] Michael B. Jones.
The Microsoft Interactive TV System: An Experience Report
. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-97-18, July, 1997.
[Julin9l] Daniel Julin, Jonathan Chew, Mark Stevenson, Paulo Guedes, Paul Neves, Paul Roy.
Generalized Emulation Services for Mach
3.0
: Overview, Experiences and Current Status
. In Proceedings of the Usenix Mach Symposium, 1991.
[Lee98] Dennis Lee, Patrick Crowley, Jean-Loup Baer, Tom Anderson, Brian Bershad.
Execution characteristics of desktop applications on Windows NT
. In Proceedings of the 25
th
International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, June 1998.
[Liedtke95] Jochen Liedtke.
On
□-
kernel construction
. In 15
th
ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 237-250, Copper Mountain Resort, Colorado, December 1995.
[Mogul87] Jeffrey Mogul, Richard Rashid, Michael Accetta.
The Packet Filter: an Efficient Mechanism for User-level Network Code
. In
11
th
ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, November 1987.
[Rashid87] Richard Rashid.
From RIG to Accent to Mach: The evolution of a network operating system
. Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report, August 1987.
[Rozier88] M. Rozier, A. Abrassimov, F. Armand, I. Boule, M. Gien, M. Guillemont, F. Hermann, C. Kaiser, S. Langlois, P. Leonard, W. Neuhauser.
CHORUS distributed operating system
. In Computing Systems, pages 305-370, Vol. 1-4, 1988.
[Young89] Michael Wayne Young.
Exporting a User Interface to Memory Management from a Communication
-
Oriented Operating System
. Ph.D. Thesis CMU-CS-89-202, Carnegie Mellon University, November 1989.
Mach [Black92] defined an interface for external memory managers [Young89] and was able to split virtual memory into functionally distinct parts, allowing part of the functionality to reside outside the privilege-level component (the “kernel”). Mach also separated part of the Unix operating system services out of the kernel [Golub90, Helander94], achieving modularity but limited additional functionality. The multiserver project [Julin91] went further in the modularization by splitting the Unix services into multiple independent servers. The componentization added structure and generality to the services. However, keeping the services in multiple add
Forin Alessandro
Helander Johannes V.
Courtenay III St. John
Leydig , Voit & Mayer, Ltd.
Microsoft Corporation
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