Fast Concurrent Dynamic Linking for an Adaptive Operating System.pdfVIP

Fast Concurrent Dynamic Linking for an Adaptive Op erating System  Crispin Cowan Tito Autrey Calton Pu and Jonathan Walp ole Department of Computer Science and Engineering Oregon Graduate Institute of Science Technology synthetixrequestcseogiedu Octob er Abstract The need for customizable and applicationsp eci c op erating systems has b een rec ognized for many years A customizable op erating system is one that can adapt to some particular circumstance to gain some functional or p erformance b enets Micro kernels have attempted to address this problem but suer p erformance degradation due to the cost of interpro cess protection barriers Commercial op erating systems that can eciently adapt themselves to changing circumstances have failed to app ear in part due to the diculty of providing an interface that is ecient to invoke provides a protection barrier and can b e dynamically recongured Providing such a safe ecient and dynamic interface in a concurrent op erating system requires an eective concurrency control mechanism to prevent conicts b e tween system comp onents prop osing to execute sp ecialized comp onents and those comp onents resp onsible for dynamically replacing sp ecialized comp onents This pa p er outlines our basic approach to sp ecialization of op erating systems and details our dynamic replacement mechanism and its concurrency control features Intro duction A key dilemma faced by operating system developers is the need to produce software that is both generalpurpose and ecient Operating systems must execute correctly under all  This research is partially su