Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!ucsd!ncr-sd!greg
From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Signals after exec
Message-ID: <963@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 28 Feb 89 07:50:27 GMT
References: <1187@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <9687@smoke.BRL.MIL> <90896@sun.uucp> <941@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <2071@lcuxlm.ATT.COM>
Distribution: na
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 28

In article <941@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, I write:
> This was my initial reaction, too, but then I remembered a paper at the
> Winter USENIX conference that presented something called "variable-weight
> processes."  This paper very neatly unified the model of a thread and a
> process by defining groups of resources, including memory map, file
> descriptors, signals, and other resources, that could be shared between

In article <2071@lcuxlm.ATT.COM> ram@lcuxlm.ATT.COM (Miani Rich) writes:
>I think the paper was entitled "Lightweight Processes" ....

The citation is "Variable-Weight Processes with Flexible Shared Resources"
by Ziya Aral, Illya Gertner, Alan Langerman, and Greg Schaffer of Encore
Computer Group and James Bloom and Thomas Doepplner of Brown University.
It's in the proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Technical Conference,
pages 405-412.

It's this sort of model that allows the Unix operating system to grow
and still remain compatible with earlier versions -- identifying the
common concept behind different things.  This particular model unifies
processes and threads in a way so that a program can have greater control
over its resources.  I hope those architects who are designing our follow-
on operating systems (I'm thinking of Mach, 4.4BSD, SysV.4, ...) should
look at this paper and think seriously about this model.

Encore is on the the net, and I think Brown is, as well.  Do any of the
authors (or others) wish to discuss the subject further?
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg@ncr-sd