Background Analysis and Design of ABOS, an Agent-Based Operating System Author: Mikael Svahnberg,
[email protected] A Software Engineering Master’s Thesis at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, 1998. 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 distribut- edness, 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, cre- ating a fault-tolerant distributed operating system that can adapt and be adapted to almost any situa- tion 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 Author Mikael Svahnberg,
[email protected] Advisors Håkan Grahn,
[email protected] Paul Davidsson,
[email protected] A Software Engineering Master’s Thesis at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, 1998. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview.............................................................................. 3 1.2 Current Praxis...................................................................... 4 UNIX.................................................................................