The PANDA System Architecture - A Pico-Kernel Approach

The goal of PANDA is to provide an environment for parallel and distributed programming in C++. The system consists of a small operating system kernel, and a runtime package located in user space. In this paper, the concepts of PANDA are outlined with focus on the system architecture. 1 Introduction Many research activities on new operating system architectures concentrate on using the object-oriented paradigm. Such systems focus on an object-oriented programming language and class libraries rather than on system call interfaces. An increasing number of operating system mechanisms is provided in non-privileged user space; they are not distinguishable from operations provided by the user. Thus, the system functionality can easily be tailored according to specific application requirements. The use of the system interface is facilitated by language dependency, since there is no impedance mismatch between an application and the operating system. In particular, compiler support is not los..