Re: size and complexity

[yhcrana <dd002b@uhura.cc.rochester.edu> writes:]

>how small can VSTA be? what if the file system and all un-neccesary modules
>were droped? How hard would it be to implement on a message passing
>machine?

With process debugging and pstat left out (as well as all debug assertion
instrumentation and kernel debugger) the VSTa kernel is about 40K. No
servers are required by VSTa, although this will leave you with a kernel
spinning in the idle loop.

A large fraction of VSTa has to do with implementing message passing on a
MIMD shared memory multiprocessor (with a uniprocessor x86 being a special
case of this). The best way to pass messages across machines is to
implement a network server to forward VSTa messages across whatever
message-passing facility you have in hardware. This would simply be a
user-level server which attaches to the message passing hardware to send
across messages as appropriate. To get an idea of what this looks like, see
Pike's paper on Plan 9 networking. It's available on research.att.com.

                                                        Regards,
                                                        Andy
Received on Tue Jul 26 12:10:42 1994