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Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa (Summary)

Authors:

Butler W. Lampson,

David D. RedellAuthors Info & Claims

SOSP '79: Proceedings of the seventh ACM symposium on Operating systems principles

Pages 43 - 44

https://doi.org/10.1145/800215.806568

Published: 10 December 1979 Publication History

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Abstract

In early 1977 we began to design the concurrent programming facilities of Pilot, a new operating system for a personal computer [5]. Pilot is a fairly large program itself (25,000 lines of Mesa code). In addition, it supports some large applications, ranging from data base management to internetwork message transmission, which are heavy users of concurrency (our experience with some of these applications is discussed in the paper). We intended the new facilities to be used at least for the following purposes:

Local concurrent programming: An individual application can be implemented as a tightly coupled group of synchronized processes to express the concurrency inherent in the application.

Global resource sharing: Independent applications can run together on the same machine, cooperatively sharing the resources; in particular, their processes can share the processor.

Replacing interrupts: A request for software attention to a device can be handled directly by waking up an appropriate process, without going through a separate interrupt mechanism (e.g., a forced branch, etc.).

References

[1]

Brinch Hansen, P., Operating System Principles, Prentice-Hall, 1973.

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[2]

Brinch Hansen, P. "The programming language Concurrent Pascal," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering1, 2, pp 199-207 (June 1975).

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[3]

Hoare, C.A.R., "Monitors: An operating system structuring concept," Comm. ACM17, 10, pp 549-557, (Oct 1974).

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[4]

Mitchell, J.G., Maybury, W. and Sweet, R., Mesa Language Manual, Report CSL-79-3, Xerox Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, 1979.

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[5]

Redell, D. et. al., "Pilot: An operating system kernel for a personal computer," to appear in Comm. ACM.

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Cited By

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Gay DLevis Pvon Behren RWelsh MBrewer ECuller D(2014)The nesC languageACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2641638.264165249:4S(41-51)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2641638.2641652
Hazra RDey SKanjilal ABhattacharya S(2013)Comparative analysis of real time resource access control protocols using UML 2.0ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2507288.250730538:5(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2507288.2507305
Volos HTack ASwift MLu S(2012)Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2248487.215099947:4(211-222)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2248487.2150999
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Index Terms

Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa (Summary)
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Process management
        Monitors

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Published In

SOSP '79: Proceedings of the seventh ACM symposium on Operating systems principles

December 1979

163 pages

ISBN:0897910095

DOI:10.1145/800215

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 December 1979

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Gay DLevis Pvon Behren RWelsh MBrewer ECuller D(2014)The nesC languageACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2641638.264165249:4S(41-51)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2641638.2641652
Hazra RDey SKanjilal ABhattacharya S(2013)Comparative analysis of real time resource access control protocols using UML 2.0ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2507288.250730538:5(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2507288.2507305
Volos HTack ASwift MLu S(2012)Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2248487.215099947:4(211-222)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2248487.2150999
Volos HTack ASwift MLu S(2012)Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugsACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/2189750.215099940:1(211-222)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2189750.2150999
Volos HTack ASwift MLu SHarris TScott M(2012)Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugsProceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2150976.2150999(211-222)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2150976.2150999
Hamberg RVaandrager F(2008)Using model checkers in an introductory course on operating systemsACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/1453775.145379342:6(101-111)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1453775.1453793
Gay DLevis Pvon Behren RWelsh MBrewer ECuller DCytron RGupta R(2003)The nesC languageProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation10.1145/781131.781133(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/781131.781133
Gay DLevis Pvon Behren RWelsh MBrewer ECuller D(2003)The nesC languageACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78113338:5(1-11)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/780822.781133
Gait J(1984)Semaphores outside the kernelACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/948290.94829119:10(12-21)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1984
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/948290.948291
Horsley TLynch WBauer FStucki LLehman M(1979)PilotProceedings of the 4th international conference on Software engineering10.5555/800091.802927(94-99)Online publication date: 17-Sep-1979
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/800091.802927
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