Life on the OS/network boundary
Larry Peterson · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1993
Few would argue that protocols are central to the construction of distributed systems.Whether they support remote procedure calls, file transfer, or group communication, protocols are the fundamental building blocks of distributed systems.This paper is not about any particular protocol, but rather about our experiences implementing protocols, in general, in the x-kemel.The x-kernel was originally designedto function as a full-fledged operating system kernel.The original design philosophy was that an operating system kernel is primarily a communication multiplexor, and so the one thing it had better do well is support communication protocols.Towards this end, the x-kernel was