Книга: Distributed operating systems

7.7. SUMMARY

7.7. SUMMARY

Amoeba is a new operating system designed to make a collection of independent computers appear to its users as a single timesharing system. In general, the users are not aware of where their processes are running (or even on what type of CPU), and are not aware of where their files are stored or how many copies are being maintained for reasons of availability and performance. However, users who are explicitly interested in parallel programming can exploit the existence of multiple CPUs for splitting a single job over many machines.

Amoeba is based on a microkernel that handles low-level process and memory management, communication, and I/O. The file system and the rest of the operating system can run as user processes. This division of labor keeps the kernel small and simple.

Amoeba has a single mechanism for naming and protecting all objects — capabilities. Each capability contains rights telling which operations may be performed using it. Capabilities are protected cryptographically using one-way functions. Each one contains a checksum field that assures the security of the capability.

Three communication mechanisms are supported: RPC and raw FLIP for point-to-point communication, and reliable group communication for multiparty communication. The RPC guarantees at-most-once semantics. The group communication is based on reliable broadcasting as provided by the sequencer algorithm. Both mechanisms are supported on top of the FLIP protocol and are closely integrated. Raw FLIP is only used under special circumstances.

The Amoeba file system consists of three servers: the bullet server for file storage, the directory server for file naming, and the replication server for file replication. The bullet server maintains immutable files that are stored contiguously on disk and in the cache. The directory server is a fault-tolerant server that maps ASCII strings to capabilities. The replication server handles lazy replication.

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