The Gutenberg Operating System Kernel

The Gutenberg system is a port-based, object-oriented operating system kernel designed to facilitate the design and structuring of distributed systems. This is achieved by providing primitives for controlling process interconnections and thereby controlling access to shared resources. Only shared resources are viewed as protected objects. Processes communicate with each other and access protected objects through the use of ports. Each port is associated with an abstract data type operation and can be created by a process only if the process possesses the privilege to execute that operation. Capabilities to create ports for requesting operations are contained in the capability directory which is a kernel object. At any time, each process is associated with a single subdirectory of the capability directory designated as its