
TL;DR
This paper offers formal definitions and principles to understand the core structure and purpose of operating systems, aiming to create a symbolic framework that encompasses practical OS design and algorithms.
Contribution
It introduces formal definitions of OS, processes, and files, along with principles that identify core operations and algorithms, providing a foundational framework for OS analysis.
Findings
Definitions of OS, processes, and files established.
Core operations for single computer OS identified.
Framework derived from paging and segmentation algorithms.
Abstract
While the engineering of operating systems is well understood, their formal structure and properties are not. The latter needs a clear definition of the purpose of an OS and an identification of the core. In this paper I offer definitions of the OS, processes and files, and present a few useful principles. The principles allow us to identify work like closure and continuation algorithms, in programming languages that is useful for the OS problem. The definitions and principles should yield a symbolic, albeit semiquantitative, framework that encompasses practice. Towards that end I specialise the definitions to describe conventional OSes and identify the core operations for a single computer OS that can be used to express their algorithms. The assumptions underlying the algorithms offer the design space framework. The paging and segmentation algorithms for conventional OSes are extracted…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed and Parallel Computing Systems · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
