Hive: operating system fault containment for shared-memory multiprocessors
John M. Chapin · 1997
Reliability and scalability are major concerns when designing general-purpose operating systems for large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. This dissertation describes Hive, an operating system with a novel kernel architecture that addresses these issues. Hive is structured as an internal distributed system of independent kernels called cells. This architecture improves reliability because a hardware or software error damages only one cell rather than the whole system. The architecture improves scalability because few kernel resources are shared by processes running on different cells. The Hive prototype is a complete implementation of UNIX SVR4 and is targeted to run on the Stanford FLASH multiprocessor. The research described in the dissertation makes three primary contributions: (1) it demonstrates that distributed system mechanisms can be used to provide fault containment inside a shared-memory multiprocessor; (2) it provides a specification for a set of hardware features, imple...