@(#)NBSproposal.t 1.2 88/02/26
*troff -ms
.nr SP 6 .vs 14 Project Title: Berkeley UNIX .vs 12 Principal Investigator:

Domenico Ferrari
Computer Science Division, EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
ferrari@berkeley.edu
(415)642-3806
Summary:

The goal of the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley is to apply leading edge research ideas into a stable and reliable implementation that solves current problems in operating systems research. Since the release of 4.3BSD in mid 1986, we have been working on four major new areas of research. 1) Develop an OSI network protocol suite and to integrate existing ISO applications into Berkeley UNIX. The network architecture of 4.2BSD was designed to accommodate multiple network protocol families and address formats, and an implementation of the ISO OSI network protocols should fit this framework without much difficulty. The outline of the proposal is to implement the OSI connectionless internet protocol (CLNP), and device drivers for X.25, 802.3, and possibly 802.5 interfaces, and to integrate these with an OSI transport class 4 (TP-4) implementation. We will receive an updated ISO Development Environment (ISODE) and incorporate these into the Berkeley Software Distribution. ISODE implements the session and presentation layers of the OSI protocol suite, and will include an implementation of the file transfer protocol FTAM. If possible, an X.400 implementation now being done at University College, London and the University of Nottingham will also be available for testing and distribution. This work will include participation in interoperability tests with vendors and users on OSINET. 2) Bring the Berkeley UNIX kernel into compliance with the P1003.1 POSIX interface recently approved by the IEEE. This work includes the development of a completely new terminal driver. The new terminal driver must have a binary compatibility interface to allow a transition path for programs using the old Berkeley terminal driver. A POSIX session and job control implementation must be developed. Those system utilities that create sessions and manipulate jobs must be converted to use the new facilities. Numerous other smaller POSIX related changes must be made including expanded signal functionality, restructured directory access routines, and new set-user-identifier functionality. 3) Refine the TCP/IP networking to improve its performance and limit congestion on slow and/or lossy networks. The version of TCP with the new ``slow-start,'' round-trip time estimation, and congestion control algorithms has been tested extensively, and is included in the current Berkeley ``Tahoe'' test release. It has been adopted by many vendors of 4.2BSD- and 4.3BSD-derived networking software. Additional performance experiments have been done by Van Jacobson of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and several additional performance improvements are ready to be merged into the Berkeley TCP. 4) Provide a standard interface to file systems so that multiple local and remote file systems can be supported, much as multiple networking protocols are supported by 4.3BSD. The most critical shortcoming of our current UNIX system is in the area of distributed file systems. As with networking protocols, there is no single distributed file system that provides enough speed and functionality for all problems. It is frequently necessary to support several different remote file system protocols, just as it is necessary to run several different network protocols. Our work is aimed at providing a common framework to support these different distributed file systems simultaneously rather than to simply implement yet another protocol. Briefly, the proposal adopts the 4.3BSD calling convention for file name lookup but otherwise is closely related to Sun's VFS. A prototype implementation is now being developed.