The most up-to-date documentation is in the source code itself, see in particular the header files in the hurd directory.

There is a started but as-of-yet incomplete manual in the doc directory, which documents the Viengoos API and the Hurd API. A version of that is available here. It is not, however, automatically regenerated, and thus may not be up to date.

Academic Papers

  • Viengoos: A Framework for Stakeholder-Directed Resource Allocation. By Neal H. Walfield. Submitted to EuroSys 2009.

    General-purpose operating systems not only fail to provide adaptive applications the information they need to intelligently adapt, but also schedule resources in such a way that were applications to aggressively adapt, resources would be inappropriately scheduled. The problem is that these systems use demand as the primary indicator of utility, which is a poor indicator of utility for adaptive applications.

    We present a resource management framework appropriate for traditional as well as adaptive applications. The primary difference from current schedulers is the use of stakeholder preferences in addition to demand. We also show how to revoke memory, compute the amount of memory available to each principal, and account shared memory. Finally, we introduce a prototype system, Viengoos, and present some benchmarks that demonstrate that it can efficiently support multiple aggressively adaptive applications simultaneously.

  • Improving Usability via Access Decomposition and Policy Refinement. By Neal H. Walfield and Marcus Brinkmann. Technical report (submitted to HotOS 2007).

    Commodity operating systems fail to meet the security, resource management and integration expectations of users. We propose a unified solution based on a capability framework as it supports fine grained objects, straightforward access propagation and virtualizable interfaces and explore how to improve resource use via access decomposition and policy refinement with minimum interposition. We argue that only a small static number of scheduling policies are needed in practice and advocate hierarchical policy specification and central realization.

Miscellaneous