Papers from the third ACM symposium on operating systems principles

The organizers of the First Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-1) believed that the problems of designing operating systems were being approached in much too haphazard a manner and that an attempt should be made to identify and discuss useful principles on which to base the design of future operating systems. In the Third Symposium the tradition of SOSP-1 (Gatlinburg 1967) and SOSP-2 (Princeton 1969) was maintained by providing a valuable forum on the recent progress of research in operating system design. During this five-year period a greater understanding of several aspects of operating system design has been reached--such as process interaction, memory management, and resource allocation--and it could perhaps be claimed that in these areas we are close to the goal of identifying useful general design principles. These particular topics, in one guise or another, have figured prominently in all three symposia, as can be seen by the titles of the technical sessions at each symposium listed in Table I. The problems of performance monitoring, measurement, a~d instrumentation received attention in both SOSP-2 and SOSP-3, but not in SOSP-1. Interest in computer data communications would seem to have diminished since SOSP-1, whereas