Making Paths Explicit in the Scout Operating System

<_author_search_(david mosberger)>David Mosberger and <_author_search_(larry l. peterson)>Larry L. Peterson

TR 96-05

Abstract

This paper makes a case for paths as an explicit abstraction in operating system design. Paths provide a unifying infrastructure for several OS mechanisms that have been introduced in the last several years, including fbufs, integrated layer processing, packet classifiers, code specialization, and migrating threads. This paper articulates the potential advantages of a path-based OS structure, describes the specific path architecture implemented in the Scout OS, and demonstrates the advantages in a particular application domain?receiving, decoding, and displaying MPEG-compressed video.

Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721