Components for operating system design

Abstract

Components are being increasingly used in the construction of complex application software. Operating systems suffer from similar software complexities, causing a move to architectures such as micro-kernels. The authors propose a low-overhead technique for providing components that allow the level of coupling between components to be varied at run-time. In doing so, they indicate their use in a component-orientated operating system to allow its components to be 'hot-plugged' during execution.