Abstract
This paper presents an overview of Wisdom, a distributed operating system for a network of transputers, and discusses some of the issues associated with its design and implementation in occam. The occam model of concurrency is not ideal for supporting a general purpose operating system, in particular the inability to create dynamically processes in seen as an unnecessary limitation. Consequently we first consider how occam can be extended to make it more suitable as an implementation language. Next an appropriate interprocess communication facility is developed in the context of the extended occam model and experiences from other projects. Three areas are then identified as essential to support the proposed system: routing, naming and load balancing. These are discussed and on the basis of simulations or prototype implementations conclusions are drawn. The philosophy behind Wisdom is that everything should be small and simple, being built out of other, lower level, simpler modules when necessary. It is also hoped to reduce the ‘critical’ components of an operating system (traditionally the kernel) to a minimum.
Published Version
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