The Development of a Distributed Capability System for VLOS

Chung, V.-L. and MacDonald, C.S.

VLOS is a project investigating the suitability of a tuple space-based distributed operating system for running computationally intensive distributed applications on clusters of commodity (i.e, Intel TMPC based) hardware. Unlike previous efforts, UNIX backwards compatibility is not a goal of VLOS. In order to provide task-level granularity security for tuple spaces, field types and type signatures, a capability-based system has been developed for VLOS. The distributed capability system uses an arbitration scheme in which the nodes in a cluster of commodity workstations elect a single node to manage namespace allocations, to ensure that there are no collisions in the assignment of new tuple object identities. Initial implementations have been developed to run as Linux applications and to execute 'stand-alone' with the support of the Flux OSKit. Trials show that the distributed capability security system for VLOS meets our initial design requirements, and is effective in providing (distributed) system-wide protection of tuple spaces, type signatures and field types.

Cite as: Chung, V.-L. and MacDonald, C.S. (2002). The Development of a Distributed Capability System for VLOS. In Proc. Seventh Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architectures Conference (ACSAC2002), Melbourne, Australia. CRPIT, 6. Lai, F. and Morris, J., Eds. ACS. 57-64.

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