| Developer | University of California, Berkeley |
|---|---|
| Written in | C (programming language) |
| OS family | Unix-like |
| Working state | Historic |
| Platforms | DECstation 5000 Model 200, SPARCstation 2 |
| Kernel type | Monolithic kernel |
| Default user interface | Command-line interface |
| License | MIT License |
| Official website | Sprite home page |
Sprite is an experimental Unix-like distributed operating system developed at the University of California, Berkeley by John Ousterhout's research group between 1984 and 1992. Its notable features include support for single system image on computer clusters [1] and the introduction of the log-structured filesystem. The Tcl scripting language also originated in this project.
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 is only used on-demand, and most user actions occur against the cache. Similar utilities allow remote devices to be mapped into the local computer's space, allowing for network printing and similar duties.
Many of the key Unix files are based on the network, including things like the password file. All machines in a network share 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 makes a Sprite network appear as if it were a single large time-sharing system, or a single-system image.
Another key addition to Sprite is process migration, which allows programs to be moved between machines at any time. The system maintains a list of machines and their state, and automatically moves processes to idle machines to improve local performance. Processes can 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) can appear very fast.
Work on the "early" Sprite outlined above ended around 1987, but was improved[ clarification needed ] during the next year. Starting in 1990 Sprite was used as the basis for development of the first log-structured file system (LFS), development of which continued until about 1992. LFS dramatically increases the performance of file writes at the expense of read performance. Under Sprite, this tradeoff is particularly useful because most read access is cached anyway—that is, Sprite systems typically perform fewer reads than a normal Unix system. LFS-like systems also allow for much easier crash recovery, which became a major focus of the project during this period. Additional experimentation on striped file systems, both striped across different machines as well as clusters of drives, continued until about 1994.
Sprite was not a microkernel system, and suffers the same sort of problems as other Unixes in terms of development complexity, becoming increasingly difficult to develop as more functionality was added. [2] By the 1990s it was suffering and the small team supporting the project was simply not able to keep up with the rapid changes in Unix taking place during this time. The project was slowly shut down by 1994.
Mach is a kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computing. Mach is often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of a microkernel. However, not all versions of Mach are microkernels. Mach's derivatives are the basis of the operating system kernel in GNU Hurd and of Apple's XNU kernel used in macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has been free and open-source. The final official release was in early 2015.
John Kenneth Ousterhout is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit, and proposed the idea of coscheduling. Ousterhout led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ousterhout also led the team that developed the Magic VLSI computer-aided design (CAD) program.
DNIX is a discontinued Unix-like real-time operating system from the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB (DIAB). A version named ABCenix was developed for the ABC 1600 computer from Luxor. Daisy Systems also had a system named Daisy DNIX on some of their computer-aided design (CAD) workstations. It was unrelated to DIAB's product.
The Unix file system (UFS) is a family of file systems supported by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is a distant descendant of the original filesystem used by Version 7 Unix.
A log-structured filesystem is a file system in which data and metadata are written sequentially to a circular buffer, called a log. The design was first proposed in 1988 by John K. Ousterhout and Fred Douglis and first implemented in 1992 by Ousterhout and Mendel Rosenblum for the Unix-like Sprite distributed operating system.
NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol.
Amoeba is a distributed operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and others at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The aim of the Amoeba project was to build a timesharing system that makes an entire network of computers appear to the user as a single machine. Development at the Vrije Universiteit was stopped: the source code of the latest version (5.3) was last modified on 30 July 1996.
UnixWare is a Unix operating system. It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell. It was then taken over by Novell. Via Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), it went on to Caldera Systems, Caldera International, and The SCO Group before it was sold to UnXis. UnixWare is typically deployed as a server rather than a desktop. Binary distributions of UnixWare are available for x86 architecture computers. UnixWare is primarily marketed as a server operating system.
OpenSSI is an open-source single-system image clustering system. It allows a collection of computers to be treated as one large system, allowing applications running on any one machine access to the resources of all the machines in the cluster.
In computing, file system or filesystem is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system."
Helios is a discontinued Unix-like operating system for parallel computers. It was developed and published by Perihelion Software. Its primary architecture is the Inmos Transputer. Helios' microkernel implements a distributed namespace and messaging protocol, through which services are accessed. A POSIX compatibility library enables the use of Unix application software, and the system provides most of the usual Unix utilities.
Spring is a discontinued project in building an experimental microkernel-based object-oriented operating system (OS) developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Using technology substantially similar to concepts developed in the Mach kernel, Spring concentrated on providing a richer programming environment supporting multiple inheritance and other features. Spring was also more cleanly separated from the operating systems it would host, divorcing it from its Unix roots and even allowing several OSes to be run at the same time. Development faded out in the mid-1990s, but several ideas and some code from the project was later re-used in the Java programming language libraries and the Solaris operating system.
Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster. Lustre file system software is available under the GNU General Public License and provides high performance file systems for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site systems. Since June 2005, Lustre has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 1 ranked TOP500 supercomputer in November 2022, Frontier, as well as previous top supercomputers such as Fugaku, Titan and Sequoia.
The Log-Structured File System is an implementation of a log-structured file system, originally developed for BSD. It was removed from FreeBSD and OpenBSD; the NetBSD implementation was nonfunctional until work leading up to the 4.0 release made it viable again as a production file system.
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.
A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a "journal", which is usually a circular log. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems can be brought back online more quickly with a lower likelihood of becoming corrupted.
The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.
... the Sprite kernel became harder and harder to maintain as it aged
