Francisco J. Ballesteros Luis L. Fernandez
Systems and Communications Group
Carlos III University of Madrid
To build a distributed operating system the microkernel approach is the most popular. To build an adaptable operating system a minimal microkernel is preferred. But for an adaptable and flexible distributed operating system the previous approaches are not enough because they create an artificial barrier to OS distribution and harm system transparency and adaptability.
This paper express how adaptable distributed systems could be built and describes an example implementation named Off where the microkernel itself and its abstractions are both distributed and adaptable. It is shown why the system interface should be close to the hardware but not restricted to a local node. The whole network is considered to be the exported and multiplexed hardware in contrast to what is done by today microkernel in ``distributed'' OSes eliminating the artificial view of nodes as isolated entities.