Network Performance in Arena

摘要

Arena is a customisable distributed operating system. Customisable systems seek to provide application-specific resource management. A major consideration in such systems, particularly where customisation is supported at user-level, is the issue of flexibility versus effciency. This issue is seen in distributed systems, where the performance of handling network traffic is of prime importance. This paper describes the mechanisms used in the Arena customisable operating system~1 (Mayes et al, 1994) to support flexible and efficient network handling on a distributed store multicomputer. In order to gain some relative measure of the costs of flexibility in the Arena event handling mechanism, Arena network data transfer performance has been compared with that of a microkernel.