Implementation of Team Shoshin: An Exercise in Porting and Multiprocess Structuring of the Kernel

Team Shoshin is an extension of Shoshin, a testbed for distributed software originally developed on the LSI 11/23s at the University of Waterloo. This thesis presents a description of the implementation of Team Shoshin on the Sun Workstation. With wide disparity in the underlying hardware, a major part of our initial development effort is to port Shoshin to its new hardware. The problems and design decisions faced by the porting effort and how they are overcome will be discussed. The development of Team Shoshin has provided us the opportunity to investigate the use of multiprocess structuring techniques at the kernel level. We will describe the design and implementation of the proposed kernel multiprocess structure and the rationale behind it. The applicability of the proposed kernel multiprocess structure and its impact on operating system design will be discussed drawing from experience gained through actual implementation.