Paper Info
Title
FLEX: a tool for building efficient and flexible systems
Abstract
Modern operating systems must support a wide variety of services for a diverse set of users. Designers of these systems face a tradeoff between functionality and performance. Systems like Mach provide a set of general abstractions and attempt to handle every situation, which can lead to poor performance for common cases. Other systems, such as Unix, provide a small set of abstractions that can be made very efficient, at the expense of functionality. We are implementing a flexible system building tool, FLEX, that allows us to support a powerful operating systems interface efficiently by constructing specialized module implementations at runtime. FLEX improves the performance of existing systems by optimizing interprocess communications paths and relocating servers and clients to reduce communications overhead. These facilities improve the performance of Unix system calls on Mach from 20-400%. Furthermore, FLEX can dynamically extend the kernel in a controlled fashion, which gives user programs access to privileged data and devices not envisioned by the original operating system implementor
Year
DOI
Venue
1993
10.1109/WWOS.1993.348148
Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
operating systems (computers),software tools,user interfaces,FLEX,Mach,Unix,abstractions,clients,communications overhead,flexible system building tool,flexible systems,interprocess communications,kernel,module implementations,operating systems,operating systems interface,servers
Kernel (linear algebra),Functional programming,Computer science,Server,Unix,FLEX,Implementation,Control system,User interface,Operating system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
4.24
6
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John B. Carter11785162.82
Bryan Ford21573149.56
Mike Hibler341462.01
Ravindra Kuramkote415414.86