Physical memory management in a network operating system
Michael N. Nelson · 1988
Introduction The work presented in this dissertation was motivated by two recent changes in technology: networks and large memories. The introduction of networks has led to a move away from centralized timesharing operating systems towards network operating systems. In these network operating systems each user has a personal highperformance workstation and communicates with other users across a network. Data that was once stored on a single set of disks in the timesharing systems is now distributed amongst the disks of several workstations. In fact, many of the workstations do not have any disk at all; the data for these diskless workstations is stored across the network on the disks of other workstations. The move towards network operating systems poses two problems: how to provide users with high performance and how to allow users to easily share data. Performance is a problem in network environments because each access of data may require both a network access and a disk acc