Background Analysis and Design of ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System

Modern operating systems should be extensible and flexible. This means that the operating system should be able to accept new behaviour and change existing behaviour without too much trouble and that it should ideally also be able to do this without any, or very little, downtime. Furthermore, during the past years the importance of the network has increased drastically, creating a demand for operating systems to function in a distributed environment. To achieve this flexibility and distribut-edness,I have designed and evaluated ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System. ABOS uses agents to solve all the tasks of the operating system kernel, thus moving away from traditional monolithic kernel structures. Early results show that I have gained in flexibility and modularity, creating a fault-tolerant distributed operating system that can adapt and be adapted to almost any situa-tion with negligible decrease in performance. Within ABOS some tasks has been designed further, and there exists a demonstration of how the agent-based filesystem might work.
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Overview
1.2 Current Praxis
UNIX
Windows NT
Amoeba
Mach
CORBA
1.3 Ongoing Research
Spring
Aegis
1.4 Summary
2 Agents
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Agent characteristics
2.3 Multiagent systems
2.4 Agent enablers
KQML
April
2.5 Operating system agents
TACOMA
MOTIS and X.400
UNIX Daemons
2.6 Motivation to use agents
3 Operating System Tasks
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Process Management
3.3 Memory Management
3.4 I/O Management
3.5 File system Management
3.6 Communication support
3.7 Synchronization
3.8 Security
3.9 Summary
4 Top-Level design of ABOS
4.1 Introduction
4.2 General layout
4.3 Core
4.4 Kernel
Division between kernel and core
4.5 Services
4.6 User Applications
4.7 Summary
Assignment of functionality
Service layer
The chicken and the egg problem
4.8 Achieved goals
5 Examples
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Agent File system
Active Documents
5.3 Resource Allocation
5.4 Synchronization
5.5 Summary
6 Evaluation
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Process management
6.3 Memory Management
6.4 I/O Management
6.5 File system Management
6.6 Communication support
6.7 Synchronization
6.8 Security
6.9 Performance
6.10 Other
6.11 Summary
7 Conclusions
7.1 Summary
7.2 Conclusions
7.3 Future work
Author: Mikael Svahnberg
Source: Blekinge Institute of Technology

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