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