Early Work
Early work on Sprite was based on the idea of making the operating system more "network aware", and thereby at the same time make it invisible to the user. The primary area of work was the building of a new network file system which made heavy use of local client-side caching in order to improve performance. After opening the file and some initial reads, the network was only used on-demand, and most user actions would occur against the cache. Similar utilities allowed remote devices to be mapped into the local computer's space, allowing for network printing and similar duties.
Many of the key Unix files were based on the network, including things like the password file. All machines in a network shared the root directory as well. Other common Unix utilities such as finger
were re-written to make them network aware as well, listing all of the people logged on across the network. This made a Sprite network appear as if it were a single large time-sharing system, or a single-system image.
Another key addition to Sprite was process migration, which allowed programs to be moved between machines at any time. The system maintained a list of machines and their state, and would automatically move processes to idle machines to improve local performance. Processes could also be "evicted" from machines to improve their performance, causing the original starter to move it to another machine on the network, or take control of it locally again. Long tasks (like compiling the Sprite system) could appear very fast.
Read more about this topic: Sprite (operating System)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or work:
“Todays pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase early ripe, early rot!”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“To-day ... when material prosperity and well earned ease and luxury are assured facts from a national standpoint, womans work and womans influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a heart power into this money getting, dollar-worshipping civilization; needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and interests of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land versus gain and greed and grasping selfishness.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (18591964)