Abstracts - 1997 ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE
A Distributed Shared Memory Facility for FreeBSD
Pedro Souto and
Eugene W. Stark
Department of Computer Science,
State University of New York at Stony Brook,
Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA
Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of a distributed
shared memory facility we have implemented for the FreeBSD operating
system (a descendant of 4.4BSD that runs on the PC architecture).
Interesting aspects of the design are:
(1) the consistency protocol uses unreliable datagram communication,
but is robust with respect to message loss, and in the normal case requires
only two datagrams to handle a read fault;
(2) the facility provides a simple programming interface that does not
require any socket or network programming to use;
(3) the facility extends the FreeBSD VM system in a very non-intrusive way.
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