[OSy] 26. 11.: Andrew S. Tanenbaum

[Martin Decky]

Vazeni pratele,

rad bych upozornil, ze 26. 11. 2007 od 14:00 v S4 vystoupi se svou
prednaskou profesor Andrew S. Tanenbaum [1] z Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam. Vsichni jste srdecne zvani, strucny abstrakt naleznete nize.

Andy Tanenbaum je predevsim znam jako autor systemu MINIX a cele rady
knih, ktere jsou povazovany za standard v oblasti operacnich systemu,
distribuovanych systemu a pribuznych oborech.

[1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/

M.D.


MINIX 3: A Reliable and Secure Operating System

Most computer users nowadays are nontechnical people and have a mental
model of what they expect from a computer based on their experience with
TV sets and stereos: you buy it, plug it in, and it works perfectly for
the next 10 years. Unfortunately, they are often disappointed as
computers are not very reliable when measured against the standards of
other consumer electronics devices. A large part of the problem is the
operating system, which is often millions of lines of kernel code, each
of which can potentially bring the system down. The worst offenders are
the device drivers, which have been shown to have bug rates 3-7x more
than the rest of the system. As long as we maintain the current
structure of the operating system as a huge single monolithic program
full of foreign code and running in kernel mode, the situation will only
get worse. While there have been ad hoc attempts to patch legacy
systems, what is needed is a different approach. In an attempt to
provide much higher reliability, we have created a new multiserver
operating system with only 4000 lines in kernel and the rest of the
operating system split up into small components each running as a
separate user-mode process. For example, each device driver runs as a
separate process and is rigidly controlled by the kernel to give it the
absolute minimum amount of power to prevent bugs in it from damaging
other system components. A reincarnation server periodically tests each
user- mode component and automatically replaces failed or failing
components on the fly, without bringing the system down and in some
cases without affecting user processes. The talk will discuss the
architecture of this system, called MINIX 3, The system can be
downloaded for free from www.minix3.org