Experience with Charlotte: Simplicity vs. Function in a Distributed Operating System

摘要: Our starting point was a set of axioms that defined the environment of the project, goals that defined Our hopes, and design decisions that helped us to reach those goals. Our implementation taught us that the goals are not easily reached. In particular, the issue of simplicity is quite complex; quests for simplicity in various areas often conflict with each other. The purpose of this paper is to explain the lessons we learned and motivate the steps we took while learning those lessons. The axioms that constrained Charlotte's design were: Charlotte will run on a multicomputer. A multicomputer is a collection of conventional computers, each with its own memory, connected by a communications device. The tradeoffs between mul-ticomputers and multiprocessors, which share memory, include scalability (multicomputers have a greater potential), grain of parallelism (multicomputers are suited only to large-grain parallelism …