Genera (operating System) - Features

Features

Genera also has support for various network protocols and applications using those. It has extensive support for TCP/IP.

Genera supports one-processor machines with several threads (called processes).

Genera supports several different types of garbage collection: full Garbage Collection, in-place Garbage Collection, Incremental Garbage Collection and Ephemeral Garbage Collection. The Ephemeral Garbage Collector only uses physical memory and uses the memory management unit to get information about changed pages in physical memory. The garbage collector uses generations and the virtual memory is divided into areas. Areas can contain objects of certain types (strings, bitmaps, pathnames, ...) and each area can use different memory management mechanisms.

Genera implements two file systems: the FEP file system for large files and the LMFS (Lisp Machine File System, optimized for many small files). These file systems also maintain different versions of files. If a file is modified, Genera still keeps the old versions. Genera also provides access to other (local and remote) file systems: NFS, FTP, HFS, CDROMs and others. Genera also can read from and write to and tape drives.

Genera supports netbooting.

Genera provides a client for the Statice object-oriented database from Symbolics.

Genera makes extensive use of the condition system (exception handling) to handle all kinds of runtime errors and is able to recover from many of these errors. It allows for example to retry network operations in case a network connection has a failure - the application code will continue to run. In case of errors the user will be presented a menu of restarts (abort, retry, continue options) that are specific to the error signalled.

Genera has extensive debugging tools.

Genera can save versions of the running system to worlds. These worlds can be booted and then will contain all the saved data and code.

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