SOSP

This paper describes the motivation, design, and performance of Porcupine, a scalable mail server. The goal of Porcupine is to provide a highly available and scalable electronic mail service using a large cluster of commodity PCs. We designed Porcupine ...

While algorithms for cooperative proxy caching have been widely studied, little is understood about cooperative-caching performance in the large-scale World Wide Web environment. This paper uses both trace-based analysis and analytic modelling to show ...

Taking the concept of thin clients to the limit, this paper proposes that desktop machines should just be simple, stateless I/O devices (display, keyboard, mouse, etc.) that access a shared pool of computational resources over a dedicated ...

In this paper, we demonstrate that a collaborative relationship between the operating system and applications can be used to meet user-specified goals for battery duration. We first show how applications can dynamically modify their behavior to conserve ...

Although active networks have generated much debate in the research community, on the whole there has been little hard evidence to inform this debate. This paper aims to redress the situation by reporting what we have learned by designing, implementing ...

Although building systems from components has attractions, this approach also has problems. Can we be sure that a certain configuration of components is correct? Can it perform as well as a monolithic system? Our paper answers these questions for the ...

We have performed a study of the usage of the Windows NT File System through long-term kernel tracing. Our goal was to provide a new data point with respect to the 1985 and 1991 trace-based File System studies, to investigate the usage details of the ...

Modern file systems associate the deletion of a file with the immediate release of storage, and file writes with the irrevocable change of file contents. We argue that this behavior is a relic of the past, when disk storage was a scarce resource. Today, ...

No secure network file system has ever grown to span the Internet. Existing systems all lack adequate key management for security at a global scale. Given the diversity of the Internet, any particular mechanism a file system employs to manage keys will ...

The trend towards extensible software architectures and component-based software development demands safe, efficient, and easy-to-use extension mechanisms to enforce protection boundaries among software modules residing in the same address space. This ...

Despite the fact that large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors have been commercially available for several years, system software that fully utilizes all their features is still not available, mostly due to the complexity and cost of making the ...

EROS is a capability-based operating system for commodity processors which uses a single level storage model. The single level store's persistence is transparent to applications. The performance consequences of support for transparent persistence and ...

This paper presents the design and implementation of the Intentional Naming System (INS), a resource discovery and service location system for dynamic and mobile networks of devices and computers. Such environments require a naming system that is (i) ...

This paper describes the motivation, architecture and performance of a distributed virtual machine (DVM) for networked computers. DVMs rely on a distributed service architecture to meet the manageability, security and uniformity requirements of large, ...

Click is a new software architecture for building flexible and configurable routers. A Click router is assembled from packet processing modules called elements. Individual elements implement simple router functions like packet classification, queueing, ...

This paper proposes and evaluates soft timers, a new operating system facility that allows the efficient scheduling of software events at a granularity down to tens of microseconds. Soft timers can be used to avoid interrupts and reduce context switches ...

MS Manners is a mechanism that employs progress-based regulation to prevent resource contention with low-importance processes from degrading the performance of high-importance processes. The mechanism assumes that resource contention that degrades the ...

Systems need to run a larger and more diverse set of applications, from real-time to interactive to batch, on uniprocessor and multiprocessor platforms. However, most schedulers either do not address latency requirements or are specialized to complex ...

EMERALDS (Extensible Microkernel for Embedded, ReAL-time, Distributed Systems) is a real-time microkernel designed for small-memory embedded applications. These applications must run on slow (15-25MHz) processors with just 32-128 kbytes of memory, ...