Amoeba: a distributed operating system for the 1990s

Abstract

A description is given of the Amoeba distributed operating system, which appears to users as a centralized system but has the speed, fault tolerance, security safeguards, and flexibility required for the 1990s. The Amoeba software is based on objects. Objects are managed by server processes and named using capabilities chosen randomly from a sparse name space. Amoeba has a unique, fast file system split into two parts: the bullet service stores immutable files contiguously on the disk; the directory service gives capabilities symbolic names and handles replication and atomicity, eliminating the need for a separate transaction management system. To bridge the gap with existing systems, Amoeba has a Unix emulation facility consisting of a library of Unix system call routines that make calls to the various Amoeba server processes.