Background Analysis and Design of ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System

Background Analysis and Design of ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System

Abstract

Modern operating systems should be extensible and flexible. This means that the operating system should be able to accept new behaviour and change existing behaviour without too much trouble and that it should ideally also be able to do this without any, or very little, downtime. Furthermore, during the past years the importance of the network has increased drastically, creating a demand for operating systems to function in a distributed environment. To achieve this flexibility and distributedness, I have designed and evaluated ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System. ABOS uses agents to solve all the tasks of the operating system kernel, thus moving away from traditional monolithic kernel structures. Early results show that I have gained in flexibility and modularity, creating a fault-tolerant distributed operating system that can adapt and be adapted to almost any situation with negligible decrease in performance. Within ABOS some tasks has been designed further, and there exists a demonstration of how the agent-based filesystem might work. Keywords: Operating systems, Practical application of multi-agent systems.

Chapter One

Introduction

Requirements on modern operating systems are that they should be extensible and flexible [6]. This means that the operating system should be able to accept new behaviour and change existing behaviour without too much trouble. In truly distributed environments they should ideally also be able to do this without any, or very little, downtime. This is due to the trouble of for example migrating processes running on the machine in question. During the past years the importance of the network has increased drastically. Thus, operating systems also need to be more or less distributed. As always, performance is also an issue. The traditional way to solve performance problems is to embed everything into one single, monolithic kernel, while still using a microkernel design and object-oriented programming to achieve flexibility. This enables modules to communicate via shared memory and simple procedure calls, instead of using the overhead of inter process communication (IPC). Obviously, this embedding is in conflict with the requirement of flexibility. When every new function has to be imported or implemented in the kernel space, one cannot easily add new services on-the-fly. Indeed, it is also the exact opposite of what one wishes to achieve by using a microkernel design. The cause of this embedding is, as stated, the overhead of using IPC calls. However, recent studies [1] have shown that the overhead for IPC calls has decreased enough to make this a practical approach. The benefits one can gain by using IPC to communicate within the kernel are substantial. Modules can be exchanged during run-time and new ones can be added without having to reboot or recompile, which sometimes is the case. New strategies and resources can be changed and added as easy as they should be. By using IPC, one can also easily and transparently run some of the services on another machine, thus creating a truly distributed system. A concept that is beginning to see the light and that can address the questions above is agents. Agents are small software components with certain qualities, described later in this paper. Interesting about agents is that they are autonomous, uses IPC and can adapt over time. This makes them highly suitable for employing within an operating system kernel. My idea is to explore whether agents can be used to facilitate the tasks in an operating system. I aim to present a model where agents reside within the kernel of an operating system. Furthermore, I will present a design solution for some common tasks that a distributed operating system performs. This thesis will present a brief overview of the most commonly known operating systems, followed by a presentation of some of the research performed in operating systems. Succeeding this there is a presentation of agents and agent technologies to clarify what an agent is. There is also a survey showing what attempts has been made to apply agents in operating systems. To get some understanding of what the requirements and problems are in a modern operating system the section following this survey will deal with what an operating system should perform. Once this is clear we can move on to the presentation of ABOS, an agent-based operating system. Some examples of more top-level tasks are also given, after which it is time to evaluate the agent operating system. This is done and topped of with some concluding comments.

Topic: Background Analysis and Design of ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System

Chapters: 1 - 5
Delivery: Email

Number of Pages: 75

Price: 5000 NGN

In Stock

Buy the Complete Material Now