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Mach-US: Unix On Generic OS Object Servers
J. Mark Stevenson, Carnegie Mellon University; Daniel P Julin, ISIS Distributed Systems
This paper examines the Mach-US operating system, its unique architecture, and the lessons demonstrated through its implementation.
Mach-US is an object-oriented multi-server OS which runs on the Mach3.0 kernel. Mach-US has a set of separate servers supplying orthogonal OS services and a library which is loaded into each user process. This library uses the services to generate the semantics of the Mach2.5/4.3BSD application programmers interface (API). This architecture makes Mach-US a flexible research platform and a powerful tool for developing and examining various OS service options.
We will briefly describe Mach-US, the motivations for its design choices, and its demonstrated strengths and weaknesses. We will then discuss the insights that we've acquired in the areas of multi-server architecture, OS remote method invocation, Object Oriented technology for OS implementation, API independent OS services, UNIX API re-implementation, and smart user-space API emulation libraries.
author = {J. Mark Stevenson and Daniel P Julin},
title = {{Mach-US}: Unix On Generic {OS} Object Servers},
booktitle = {USENIX 1995 Technical Conference (USENIX 1995 Technical Conference)},
year = {1995},
address = {New Orleans, LA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-1995-technical-conference/mach-us-unix-generic-os-object-servers},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jan
}