Aucbvax.2077
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!gaines@RAND-UNIX
Sat Jul 4 10:03:45 1981
Re: Addressing and File Accessing
It is little known, but the new versions of the Honeywell 6000
have a memory management unit, internally known as NSA (for
New System Architecture, I think), which makes the machine a
form of capabilities machine. It is elaborate and baroque,
but underneath are some very powerful ideas. The architecture
supports multiple independent domains (where a domain is a set
of addressing capabilities), such that a process can consist
of many domains.
Honeywell is slowly attempting to extend the old GCOS-III
operating system to take advantage of this, and the new
version is being called GCOS-8. In addition, Honeywell
some years acquired the XDS Sigma (formerly SDS) business,
together with a little-know, but much loved by its users,
system called CP-5. The group that moved over from Xerox
as part of this deal convinced Honeywell that the operating
system could be ported to the Honeywell processor, and have
produced an interesting system called CP-6, which takes
advantage of the domain features in some nice ways. For
example, a process can have a debugger in one domain to
debug code in other domains, putting it far ahead of
almost any other system I know (including UNIX) in this
area.
Those interested in system design and memory management
approaches ought to be aware of what is going on here. It
represents a significant extension to the thinking about
domains and capabilities. Unfortunately, there is little
in the way of reports or other decent documentation, but
perhaps some beating on Honeywell would produce something.
I'm not sure that this is the right forum for this discussion.
It would be nice if someone would start and manage a conference
dealing with operating system and system design issues. WorkS
and InfoMicro seem to have lots of people interested in these
topics, but they are really focused a bit more narrowly and
differently.
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