Proceedings of the SIGOPS European Workshop, September 1996, pp. 141-148.

Server Operating Systems

M. Frans Kaashoek, Dawson R. Engler, Gregory R. Ganger and Deborah A. Wallach

Abstract

We introduce server operating systems, which are sets of abstractions and runtime support for specialized, high-performance server applications. We have designed and are implementing a prototype server OS with support for aggressive specialization, direct device-to-device access, an event-driven organization, and dynamic compiler-assisted ILP. Using this server OS, we have constructed an HTTP server that outperforms servers running on a conventional OS by more than an order of magnitude and that can safely timeshare the hardware platform with other applications.

Status

Appeared in the 1996 SIGOPS European Workshop (Connemara, Ireland, September 9-11, 1996, pp. 141-148).

Work on this project continues. See the high-performance servers page for more information.

On-line Availability