darrell@sdcsvax.UUCP (04/02/87)
[I lifted this from an announcement in mod.conferences. I think the questions]
[raised are relevant and might provoke some good discussion. -DL ]
The availability of inexpensive and powerful hardware has brought personal
workstations into offices and laboratories. As we move towards integrating
these systems, mainframes and PCs can communicate with each other to share
data. Similarly, CPU and I/O loads can be distributed onto a machine most
suited to a particular task.
To date, the operating systems used on most of these new systems have been
ported versions of those used by timesharing minicomputers; e.g. UNIX and VMS.
As the hardware continues to evolve, the operating system, being tightly
coupled to hardware technology, must also evolve. This workshop will
concentrate on issues which must be addressed in order to develop an operating
system specifically tailored to the workstation environment. Such issues
include:
1) Do workstations provide an environment which differs from minis and
super-minis in ways that should be reflected in the operating system?
2) What lessons from the mainframe world can be applied to this new
hardware?
3) What is the impact and importance of the workstation interconnection
functionality and technology?
4) How does operating system methodology need to evolve to accommodate new
generations of hardware?
5) How should applications make use of a workstation-based environment?
6) How should recovery be dealt with in these extended environments?
7) What are the appropriate software abstractions that should be presented
to both users and applications so that synchronization and sharing can
be best accomodated?
--
Darrell Long
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, UC San Diego, La Jolla CA 92093
ARPA: Darrell@Beowulf.UCSD.EDU UUCP: darrell@sdcsvax.uucp
Operating Systems submissions to: mod-os@sdcsvax.uucp