Dycos-a customizable kernel architecture supporting distributed operating environments

Abstract

Techniques of customizing and extending operating systems (OSs) have a growing impact on system architectures in the field of distributed computing and parallel programming. Even if traditional methods of adaption have been limited to the user-level, modern OSs cannot do without kernel support. Hence concepts and structures of microkernel architectures must be redefined to meet the requirements of today's and future applications. We propose a new customizable low-level OS architecture-the Dycos kernel. We discuss customization demands on microkernels and describe the basic kernel concept. Dycos is an object-based approach providing a toolbox of operations to build user-definable compositions of kernel structures. The Dycos approach has been evaluated on a Solaris 2.5.1 platform.