Network operating system

Abstract

The Network Operating System is an addition to CMS designed to allow multitasking operation, while conserving all the facilities of CMS: file system, interactivity, high level language environment. Multitasking is useful for server virtual machines, e.g. Network Transport Managers, File Managers, Disk space Managers, Tape Unit Managers, where the execution of a task involves long waits due to I/O completion, VCMF communication delays or human responses, during which the task status stays as a control block in memory, while the virtual machine serves other users executing the same lines of code. Multitasking is not only for multi-user service: a big data reduction program may run as a main task, while a side task, connected to the virtual console, gives reports on the ongoing work of the main task in response to user commands and steers the main task through common data. All the service routines (Wait, Create and Delete Task, Get and Release Buffer, VMCF Open and Close Link, Send and Receive, I/O and Console Routines) are FORTRAN callable, and may be used from any language environment consistent with the same parameter passing conventions. The outstanding feature of this system is efficiency, no user defined SVC are used, and the use of other privileged instructions as LPSW or SSM is the bare necessary, so that CP (with the associated overhead) is not too involved. System code and read-only data are write-protected with a different storage key from CMS and user program.