Pi: A New Approach to Operating System Structuring for Flexibility

Continuing innovations in hardware technology and changing demands of a wide range of applications are the two main challenges faced by operating systems. To exploit the available hardware capabilities and to meet the requirements of applications, operating systems should be made tailorable. This can be achieved by opening up implementations and avoiding preemptive decisions during design and implementations. An architecture called Pi that is based on research in operating system structuring and reflection, is proposed as a possible solution. Resources, events and interfaces are the three basic entities in the Pi architecture which relies on reification of scopes, and flexible event and change management for tailorability. These ideas are illustrated in the context of a distributed object subsystem.