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Flux Project Home Page
The Flux Operating System Project

The Fluke Nested Process Architecture
The Flux Project's objectives are
(i) to provide infrastructure (the "flux") for highly efficient
component-based systems, with flexible degrees of inter-component
trust, initially oriented to hardware-enforced protection;
(ii) to provide transparent and flexible control of all the
resources used by arbitrary subsystems; and
(iii) to distribute free and usable versions of the developed software.
We have recently developed an entirely new kernel and OS
structure on which future work will be based. A new paper,
"Microkernels Meet Recursive Virtual Machines"
describes how this system
efficiently supports recursive virtual machines. That paper
as well as a paper on
"CPU Inheritance Scheduling"
appeared at
OSDI '96.
The draft API for Fluke, the new kernel, is available in
html format,
1-up postscript and
2-up postscript.
Beware: it's currently 110 pages long (but mostly white space).
A design and rationale document will be forthcoming later this year.
One of the design features which should provide large performance gains
is safely storing portions of normal kernel objects in user space, as
outlined in these slides from a
work-in-progress talk at December '95 SOSP. This avoids kernel
entry/exit in many common cases.
Artist's renditions of
the Fluke Nested Process Architecture
and of the Fluke OS providing
encapsulated environments for untrusted applications.
Available Software
- Flux OS Toolkit:
a toolkit to provide infrastructure for constructing
operating systems.
- Mach kernel:
a major component of the
overall project is an improved kernel.
Kernel development has moved to Fluke;
major work on the Mach kernel has stopped.
- Lites Unix server:
we distribute a version of the Lites server.
- PA Mach/Lites/4.4-lite system:
a snapshot of freely distributable PA-RISC source and
binaries, in the form of a bootable, self-hosting Mach4,
Lites, and 4.4-lite system for the hp700.
- Quarks:
an Alpha release of
a portable and reasonably efficient distributed shared memory system.
- MOSS:
a highly functional DOS extender based on part of the
Flux OS toolkit, before it was completely modularized.
- Goofie:
developed by the Mach Shared Objects project,
goofie creates portable object descriptions from C++
class declarations. In the future, Goofie may be used by the Flux
project to enable system-provided polymorphic functions.
-
PA-RISC GNU tools:
we used to maintain the GNU language tools for HP's PA-RISC
architecture, and still provide recent versions, in both source and
HP-UX binary forms.
Support
The group's research in operating systems and related language work is
sponsored by grants from ARPA, NSF, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.
The Center for
Software Science is a Utah State Center for Excellence.
Job Openings
Directions and Hotel Information
Directions from the Salt Lake Airport to
the Computer Science Department at the University, and
information
on Salt Lake Hotels.
University of Utah Department of Computer Science home page
lepreau@cs.utah.edu
Last modified on Fri Nov 1 1996