Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

web.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 12 posts

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

#4

Post by rch »

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?

One place to start: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/The+difference+betw...

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

#5

Post by wmf »

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?

Yeah, that's definitely not how I would have explained it. I would say that a traditional OS provides high-level abstractions (think of system calls like open() or fork() — they're very complex compared to the underlying hardware) while the exokernel provides very low-level primitives like memory pages, disk blocks, CPU time, etc.

Throughout history, people have discovered that their OS doesn't provide the right abstractions to allow some apps to take advantage of the hardware's performance potential. The traditional solution was to add features to the OS (Web server not fast enough? sendfile() to the rescue!), but the exokernel proposes the radical alternative of providing simpler, maximally flexible abstractions and letting apps (or libOSes) implement whatever behavior they want.

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

#7

Post by efnx »

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).

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

#8

Post by efnx »

rch wrote: post #4
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?

One place to start: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/The+difference+betw...

Awesome article, thanks.
Post reply on HN