A Virtual Memory Operating System for a Distributed Workstation Environment

Recently we have seen an explosive growth in the number of high performance, low cost workstations available on the market. An increase in the usage and popularHy of new applications like windowing systems and object oriented applications has resulted from this growth. These applications rely heavily on data sharing. To support these applications, the operating system must support efficient shared memory and message passing. This paper proposes an efficient shared memory mechanism that also allows sharing of location dependent data such as linked lists and tree structures. In addition, the paper proposes efficient support for persistent objects used in object oriented applications. Finally, the paper proposes an efficient mechanism that takes advantage of diskless workstations and high speed LAN's to page remotely to a dedicated page server machine with performance similar to systems paging to a local disk.