[COFF] how was TCF different or similar to Mosix
Charles H Sauer
sauer at technologists.com
Sat Apr 3 06:09:46 AEST 2021
Amazon still carries the Popek/Walker LOCUS book
https://smile.amazon.com/Distributed-System-Architecture-Computer-Systems/dp/0262517191/
I haven't cracked it open in years, but I assume it is still the best
starting point.
On 4/2/2021 2:04 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 1:50 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu
> <mailto:tytso at mit.edu>> wrote:
>
> Out of curiousity, how was TCF different or similar to Mosix?
>
> Many similar ideas. TCF was basically the commercial implementation of
> the Locus, which Jerry and students built at UCLA (one 11/70s
> original). I want to say the Locus papers are in some early SOSPs.
>
> MOSIX was its own Unix-like OS, as was Locus [and some of this was in
> Sprite too BTW]. TCF was a huge number of rewrites to BSD and was
> UNIX. The local/remote restructuring was ad-hoc. By the time Roman
> and I lead TNF, we had created a formal VPROC layer as an analog to the
> VFS layer (more in a minute). TNC was to be thegut of Intel's Paragon
> using OSF/1 as base OS.
>
> The basic idea of all of them is that the cluster is looks like a single
> protection domain with nodes contributing resources. A Larry says a ps
> is cluster-wide. TCF had the idea of features that each node provides
> (ISA, floating-point unit, AP, /etc/..) so if a process needed specific
> resources, it would only run on a node that had those resources. But
> it also meant that processes could be migrated from a node that had the
> same resources.
>
> One of the coolest demos I ever saw was we took a new unconfigured PS/2
> at a trade show and connected the ethernet to it on the trade show
> network, and put in a boot floppy. We dialed back into a system at an
> LCC, and filled in some security things, details like the IP address of
> the new system and soon it booted and joined the cluster. It
> immediately started to add services to the cluster, we walked away, and
> (overnight) the system had set up the hard disk and started caching
> locally things that were needed for speed. Later I was editing a file
> and from another screen migrated the process around the cluster while
> the editing was active.
>
> The problem with VPROC (like VFS) is it takes surgery all over the
> kernel. In fact, for Linux 2.x kernel the OpenSSI
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/ssic-linux/> folks did all the kernel
> work to virtualize the concept of process, which sadly never got picked
> up as the kernel.org <http://kernel.org> folks did not like it (a real
> shame IMO). BTW, one of the neat side effects of a layer like VPROC is
> things like checkpoint/restart are free -- you are just migrating a
> process to the storage instead of an active processor.
>
> Anyway, Mosix has a lot of the same types of ideas. I have much less
> experience with it directly.
>
>
>
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