A Virtual Shared Tuplespace Resource Manager

Abstract

Traditional operating systems limit flexibility, performance and utilization of hardware resources by forcing applications to use inappropriate high-level abstractions, uniform protection schemes and high-level static resource management. This forced use of inappropriate services results in poor application and operating system performance. A radical new approach to operating systems design and construction is needed to meet the requirements of modern applications. Within our Centre, we are designing BITS: the Component Based Operating System, to address these issues.

To realize its full potential, BITS requires a radically new resource management strategy. The operating system design gives an environment for implementing extensions, but a resource manager module is responsible for making them available. It allows system services to be specialized, replaced or extended to better serve application-specific needs.

In this paper we propose the MAGNET Resource Manager enabling a free-market negotiation of application requests and server resources. It provides an additional level of flexibility for application participation in resource management. MAGNET also provides a platform for an additional runtime level of extensibility: dynamic modification and replacement of its parts during execution.