Touchstone Project Mach Port: Milestone Event Q4

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to describe the porting of the Mach operating system to the Touchstone IOTA prototype. The report describes the major activities associated with the port and the kernel design issues that they brought to our attention. Mach was ported to a small cube of integrated I/O nodes. Drivers for the SCSI disk drive, serial line, and the Direct-Connect hypercube routing hardware were written. Serial communication to the nodes was multiplexed through a terminal connected to an Intel SYP-301 host platform. We found that to extend the Mach thread model onto a multicomputer architecture such as Touchstone, a compatible form of shared virtual memory must be provided. Alternately, supporting the multicomputing model of high-speed inter-node message passing will require better support from the Mach kernel. For both of these usage models, the speed of inter-node message passing is critical. Further research is required into how to best provide this in the Mach environment. (kr)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 28, 1989
Accession Number
ADA224057

Entities

People

  • Don Cameron
  • Joel Clark

Organizations

  • Intel Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Boundaries
  • Computer Program Documentation
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Device Drivers
  • Environment
  • Hypervelocity Flow
  • Information Science
  • Models
  • Networks
  • Operating Systems
  • Personality
  • Prototypes

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Aerodynamics.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.