Jolitz Heritage Jolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz. [ Jolitz Heritage ]

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From 386bsd to OSPREY: The Evolution of an Operating System

From 386bsd to OSPREY: The Evolution of an Operating System October 2002. Grace Hopper Conference 2002, Vancouver, BC. From 386BSD to OSPREY: The Evolution of an Operating System, Lynne Greer Jolitz . While 386BSD is famous for pioneering inexpensive 386-based Unix systems for academics and open source code for programmers, it also proved to be a fungible framework for new approaches, unfettered by legacy or short-term commercial objective. This paper examines a single aspect of OS operation in the form of tracking root resource usage in a server, specifically processor and memory. This aspect is extremely relevant to all corporate datacenters, as the cost effectiveness of banks of as many as hundreds of servers is directly related to how effectively these two are utilized. Poor utilization of resources means a datacenter needs more machines to do the same work, while perfect resource utilization would match resource to need exactly. The author believes that the findings generalize to most other aspects of servers, as they derive efficiencies from the underlying effectiveness of these root resources – issues 386BSD addressed years ago. Due to the structure of Unix itself, however, some root resource legacies can only be conquered with a radical new approach, inspiring the OSPREY system.