[ColorForth] OS is Not a Dirty Word

[Jack Johnson <fragment@xxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Kurt B. Kaiser wrote:
> The traditional definition of an OS is an entity which manages processes and
> access to the physical resources of the system. If you haven't got many
> resources, and/or you don't use processes, then the OS can be tiny. 

Have you looked at the exokernel research being done at MIT?

http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/exo/

The papers are worth a read.  They go back to this idea in an interesting
way.  They looked at Unix and having a multiuser system needing to have
simultaneous access to resources and they reengineered the way the OS
deals with the essential problem at a very low level, so now the "OS" is
essentially a set of libraries that ride on top of the kernel.  The fun
part is that because we really are just dealing with the hardware, the
abstraction is arbitrary, so they did things like implement a Web server
with it's own TCP/IP stack and storage system to squeeze out the
performance (which worked), without mucking about with the same subsystems
that handle the same tasks for everyday users.

Worth a read.

-Jack

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