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MIT's Kaashoek receives ACM award for Exokernel Operating Systems, et al.

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Re: MIT's Kaashoek receives ACM award for Exokernel Operating Systems, et al.

#11

Post by aliguori » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 1:26 AM UTC

beza1e1 wrote: post #3

"Operating systems typically interpret instructions written in high-level programming languages and oversee their execution on a device’s hardware." What is that supposed to mean?

Exokernel was basically a very early form of a hypervisor. It's not totally novel as hypervisors have been around for a very long time but what makes the Exokernel interesting is that it doesn't try to run unmodified guests but rather runs paravirtual guests.

It's basically a very early (pretty much a full decade) predecessor to Xen.

Re: MIT's Kaashoek receives ACM award for Exokernel Operating Systems, et al.

#12

Post by rch » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 3:56 PM UTC

efnx wrote: post #7

rch wrote: post #2

a link to the distribution: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo/distrib.html

from that link: "Please note that in June, 1998, long after the exokernel was a working system, the exokernel CVS repository was discarded..." Which makes me think his award comes long after his involvement in the project. What's the most up to date project to hack around with? Is this it? (the last tarball is dated 2000 and most of the pages on exokernals are dated 1998).

The stale-ness of the code is briefly addressed 20 min into the talk below.

In a perfect world, an exokernel OS would be roughly as stale as the architecture it was built for.

Imagine an operating system that could conceivably be 'done', in a development sense.

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