\s+4B. Summary of Innovation\s-4

This is a proposal for DARPA support of operating system and networking research in the UNIX project at UC Berkeley. The goal of the project is to use leading edge research ideas in a stable and reliable implementation that solves current problems in operating systems research. The project also includes incorporation of network protocols and other subsystems into the operating system while maintaining consistency with the existing system call interface. The resulting system is widely used by other researchers in operating systems and network protocols and implementations.

The work in this proposal includes integration of an implementation of the ISO OSI networking protocols into the existing socket interface and internal network architecture, which has not yet been done in a satisfactory manner. The proposal also includes an IEEE POSIX-standard operating system interface integrated with the existing system interface in such a way that both interfaces are fully supported and interoperate fully. The networking and filesystem interfaces will be extended to allow greater flexibility and performance. Both interfaces draw upon previous work, incorporating the best features of several previous designs. These new interfaces improve upon previous work with better support for caching in layered architectures. We expect that the products of this work will become the interfaces and implementations of choice for other operating systems and networking researchers in the near future. .bp