edj@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Doug Jensen) (10/30/87)
There has been some interest expressed on past and current research into coprocessor support for operating systems. One of my graduate students, David Maynard, is doing his Ph.D. thesis here at CMU on OS co-processors. His work includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of one to support our new Alpha real-time distributed OS running on Suns. The issues can be surprisingly complex and subtle, especially for real-time DOSs where the functionality, performance, and cost tradeoffs are often quite different than for non-real-time systems. There have been a number of papers published in the last two decades on hardware augmentations for OS's (including several by me). The few instances of which I am aware that have been successfully implemented (including two of mine) were all for military computer systems. E. Douglas Jensen ARPA: edj@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu