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Research Paper On Amoeba

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 Introduction
Distributed Operating System
A distributed operating system is one that looks like an ordinary centralized operating system but runs on multiple, independent central processing units (CPUs). It implements transparency i.e. use of multiple processors is invisible to the user. The users of a true distributed system are not concerned with which machine (or machines) their programs are running on, where their files are stored, and so on. It is the software, not the hardware, that determines whether a system is distributed or not. A high degree of fault tolerance is an implicit goal for such a system.
What is Amoeba?
Amoeba is a general-purpose distributed operating system. It began as a research project at Vrije Universiteit (Free …show more content…

Every machine running Amoeba runs the same microkernel. The kernel supports the basic process, communication, and object primitives, communication, I/O and memory management. Everything else is built on top of these fundamentals, usually by user-space server processes. Processes (Definition, Creation and Their Scheduling):
-What is a Process
A process in Amoeba is a running program, which has an address space, a set of registers and a stack. Processes are distributed over multiple computers. At any given time, a computer may have any number of processes running on it, with each process possibly having multiple threads. Amoeba does not, however, have threads of a common process running on multiple computers.
-Process Creation
Forking is slow and inefficient under Amoeba. This is because when a new process is started it will usually be started on a different processor from the parent process. The idea of copying the text of a totally irrelevant program to another processor is inefficient in the context of a distributed system. Therefore there is a routine called newproc which can be used to start a new process more efficiently than with fork and exec.

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