Standard Operating Environment

Abstract: A method for reducing the time needed for setting up a computer system in a user selected language version of a disk operating system by pre-installing a plurality of modules for different language versions of disk operating systems. Upon initial power on by an end user, a minimal disk operating system runs a software setup program which installs the end user selected language version of the disk operating system and merges certain factory loaded files into the user selected language operating system. A software installation program is then run which implements the changes necessitated by each of the modules for proper operation thereby resulting in a disk operating system that is properly configured for the operation of the combination of software programs. The computer system is then re-booted to implement the changes to the configuration of the disk operating system.

Abstract: Scout is new communication-centric operating system. The principle scout abstraction (the path) is an attempt to capture all of the operating system infrastructure necessary to insure that a given network connection can achieve high and predictable performance in the face of other connections and other system loads.

Abstract: Methods, apparatus, and products are disclosed for providing policy-based operating system services in a hypervisor on a computing system. The computing system includes at least one compute node. The compute node includes an operating system and a hypervisor. The operating system includes a kernel. The hypervisor comprising a kernel proxy and a plurality of operating system services of a service type. Providing policy-based operating system services in a hypervisor on a computing system includes establishing, on the compute node, a kernel policy specifying one of the operating system services of the service type for use by the kernel proxy, and accessing, by the kernel proxy, the specified operating system service. The computing system may also be implemented as a distributed computing system that includes one or more operating system service nodes. One or more of the operating system services may be distributed among the operating system service nodes.

Abstract: Linux has succeeded not because the original goal was to make it widely portable and widely available, but because it was based on good design principles and a good development model. This strong foundation made portability and availability easier to achieve. Originally Linux was targeted at only one architecture: the Intel 80386 CPU. Today Linux runs on everything from PalmPilots to Alpha workstations; it is the most widely ported operating system available for PCs. If you write a program to run on Linux, then, for a wide range of machines, that program can be “write once, run anywhere.” It’s interesting to look at the decisions that went into the design of Linux, and how the Linux development effort evolved, to see how Linux managed to become something that was not at all part of the original vision. Linux today has achieved many of the design goals that people originally assumed only a microkernel architecture could achieve. When I began to write the Linux kernel, the conventional wisdom was that you had to use a microkernel-style architecture. However, I am a pragmatic person, and at the time I felt that microkernels (a) were experimental, (b) were obviously more complex, and (c) executed notably slower. Speed matters a lot in a real-world operating system, and I found that many of the tricks researchers were developing to speed microkernel processing could just as easily be applied to traditional kernels to accelerate their execution. By constructing a general kernel model drawn from elements common to all typical architectures, the Linux kernel gets many of the portability benefits that otherwise require an abstraction layer, without paying the performance penalty paid by microkernels. By allowing for kernel modules, hardware-specific code can often be confined to a module, keeping the core kernel highly portable. Device drivers are a good example of effective use of kernel modules to keep hardware specifics in the modules.