Hive

Abstract

and scalability are major concerns when designing operating systems for large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. In this paper we describe Hive, an operating system with a novel kernel architecture that addresses these issues Hive is structured as an internal distributed system of independent kernels called cells. This improves reliabihty because a hardwme or software fault damages only one cell rather than the whole system, and improves scalability because few kernel resources are shared by processes running on different cells. The Hive prototype is a complete implementation of UNIX SVR4 and is targeted to run on the Stanford FLASH multiprocessor.