Abstracts - 1997 ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE
Protected Shared Libraries-A New Approach to Modularity and Sharing
Arindam Banerji, John Michael Tracey, David L. Cohn
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,
University of Notre Dame
Abstract
Protected Shared Libraries, or PSLs, are a new type of support for
modularity that form a basis
for building flexible library-based operating system services. PSLs extend
the familiar notion of shared libraries with protected state and data sharing across protection
boundaries. Protected state
information allows PSLs to be used to implement sensitive operating
system services. Sharing of
data across protection boundaries yields significant performance benefits.
These features make
PSLs a viable basis on which a complete operating system can be built
largely as a set of dynamically loadable libraries without compromising protection or sacrificing
performance. PSLs also
allow highly flexible implementations of new functionality to be added to
current commercial operating systems. A prototype PSL implementation has been built into
AIX 3.2 and early performance results are encouraging.
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