Mungi: A distributed single-address-space operating system

Abstract

With the development of 64-bit microprocessors, it is now possible to combine local, secondary and remote storage into a large single address-space. This results in a uniform method for naming and accessing objects regardless of their location, removes the distinction between persistent and transient data, and simplifies the migration of data and processes. This paper describes the Mungi single address-space operating system. Mungi provides a distributed single level address-space, which is protected using password capabilities. The protection system performs efficiently on conventional architectures, and is simple enough that most programs do not need to be aware of its operation. 1 Introduction The advent of 64-bit microprocessors allows the investigation of a new class of operating systems, in which all the data managed by a traditional system are combined into a single address-space. A 64-bit address-space is not only large enough to hold all the data a process may ever want to ...