Operating Systems of the 90s and Beyond

Architectural and hardware advances in computing design are occurring at an ever quickening rate, but it is the operating system that masters the complexity of these new computing devices to make them useful tools. Operating systems can make the difference between an interesting architecture and a useful computing environment. As more complex computational structures and more powerful communication technologies become available, we are faced with the need to develop new generations of operating systems to harness their power. This volume presents the proceedings of an international workshop intended to plot a course for design and development work on operating systems over the coming decade that was held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in July 1991. Eight sessions covered: - Size, scalability and distribution in future operating systems, - The impact of future trends in hardware and communication technology, - Integrating heterogeneous operating systems, - Trends in real-time operating systems, - Fault tolerance support in futute operating systems, - Security and protection support in future operating systems, - The next generation of operating systems, - Supporting mulitmedia applications in distributed systems.

Inhalt
An agenda for research in large-scale distributed data repositories.- File system indexing, and backup.- Intelligent file systems for object repositories.- Using domains for specifying management policy.- Session one: Discussion summary.- Future operating systems: An environmental scenario and consequential challenges.- Operating system support for high-performance architectures.- Closely coupled systems.- Are operating systems at RISC?.- Operating systems of the 90's and beyond (with Emphasis on Multiprocessing).- Munin: Distributed shared memory using multi-protocol release consistency.- Session two: Discussion summary.- Autonomous heterogeneous computing Some open problems.- Coping with the past.- The immortality of operating systems or is research in operating systems still justified?.- Session three: Discussion summary.- Event-triggered versus time-triggered real-time systems.- Pre-scheduling for synchronization in hard real-time systems.- Notes on future operating systems for real-time dependable distributed computing.- Session four: Discussion summary.- Basic concepts and issues in fault-tolerant distributed systems.- Operating systems and fault-tolerance.- Fault-tolerance in sixth generation operating systems.- Fault tolerance support in future operating systems.- Fast stable storage as a basis for fault tolerant architectures.- Stable memory another look.- System-level support for dependable distributed applications.- Session five: Discussion summary.- Protection and security issues for future systems.- Some issues in security arising from distribution.- Security: System development in a new context.- Issues in security and fault tolerance.- Session six: Discussion summary.- What next? some speculations.- Some thoughts on systems challenges for the 1990s.- Next generation operating systems architecture.- Toward computing systems for the 2000 s.- Encapsulation and interaction in future operating systems.- The explainable operating system.- Soul: An object-oriented OS framework for object support.- Operating system support for object oriented distributed systems.- Session seven: Discussion summary.- Towards a human memory prosthesis.- Systems for the nineties Distributed multimedia systems.- The role of performance, scheduling, and resource reservation in multimedia systems.