Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/answers/comp/os-research/part2

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Path: bloom-beacon.mit.edu!hookup!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!osr
From: [e-mail] (Bryan O'Sullivan)
Newsgroups: comp.os.research,comp.answers,news.answers
Subject: Comp.os.research: Frequently answered questions [2/2]
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Archive-name: os-research/part2
Version: $Revision: 1.11 $
Last-Modified: $Date: 1994/03/28 23:15:36 $

        Answers to frequently asked questions
          for comp.os.research: part 2 of 2

               Bryan O'Sullivan



              TABLE OF CONTENTS


1.     Available software
1.1.   Where can I find Unix process checkpointing and restoration packages?
1.2.   What threads packages are available for me to use?
1.3.   Where can I find operating systems distributions?
1.3.1. Distributed systems and microkernels
1.3.2. Unix lookalikes
1.3.3. Others

2.     Performance and workload studies
2.1.   TCP internetwork traffic characteristics
2.2.   File system traces
2.3.   Modern Unix file and block sizes
2.3.1. File sizes
2.3.2. Block sizes
2.3.3. Inode ratios

3.     Papers, reports, and bibliographies
3.1.   From where are papers for distributed systems available?
3.2.   Where can I find other papers?
3.3.   Where can I find bibliographies?

4.     General Internet-accessible resources
4.1.   Wide Area Information Service (WAIS) and World-Wide Web (WWW) servers
4.2.   Refdbms---a distributed bibliographic database system
4.3.   The comp.os.research archive


------------------------------
Subject: [1] Available software
From: Available software

This section covers various software packages, operating systems
distributions, and miscellaneous other such items which may be of
interest to the operating systems research community.  If you have
written, or know of, some software which you believe would be of
fairly wide interest, please get in touch with the FAQ maintainer with
a view to having a short spiel and availability information included
here.

------------------------------
Subject: [1.1] Where can I find Unix process checkpointing and restoration packages?
From: Available software

- [93-01-21-10-18.30] The Condor system is available via anonymous ftp
  from ftp.cs.wisc.edu.  Condor works entirely at user level [no
  kernel modifications required] but doesn't currently support
  interprocess communication, signals, or fork().  Definitely worth a
  look.

- Bennet S Yee implemented a `mostly portable' checkpoint and restore
  package back around 1987.  When the programmer invokes the
  checkpoint procedure, it saves the state to a file; when a second
  process with the same program (but with different arguments) is
  started which calls the restore procedure, it reads the old state
  from the file.  Available via anonymous ftp from
  play.trust.cs.cmu.edu:usr/bsy/pub/save_world.shar.Z.  This package
  is known to work for Pmaxen, Sun4's, Sun3's, IBM RTs, and VAXen.
  Porting it to a new architecture should be relatively simple -- look
  at the README file.

------------------------------
Subject: [1.2] What threads packages are available for me to use?
From: Available software

- [93-02-01-10-15.15] For DEC customers, versions of VMS after 5.5 and
  Ultrix after 4.3 include bundled threads packages which implement
  both DEC's proprietary CMA and draft 4 of IEEE Pthreads.

- SunOS 4.x provides, as standard, a lightweight process (lwp) library
  which isn't compatible with anything else currently available;
  Solaris 2.x comes with a threads library which is incompatible with
  lwp as well as everything else.

- The POSIX / Ada-Runtime Project (PART) has made available an
  implementation of draft 6 of the POSIX 1003.4a Pthreads
  specification, which runs under SunOS 4.x; the current release is
  version 1.20.  Available using anonymous ftp from
  ftp.cs.fsu.edu:pub/PART.

- Stephen Crane has written a `fairly portable' threads package,
  which runs under Sun 3, Sun 4, MIPS/RISCos, Linux, and 386BSD.  It
  is available via anonymous ftp from dse.doc.ic.ac.uk:rex/lwp.tar.gz,
  with documentation in the same directory named lwp.ps.gz.

- QuickThreads is a toolkit for building threads packages, written by
  David Keppel.  It is available via anonymous ftp from
  ftp.cs.washington.edu:pub/qt-001.tar.Z, with an accompanying tech
  report at ftp.cs.washington.edu:tr/1993/05/UW-CSE-93-05-06.PS.Z.
  The code as distributed includes ports for the Alpha, x86, 88000,
  MIPS, SPARC, VAX, and KSR1.

[DCE threads? cthreads? pthreads implementations? others?]

------------------------------
Subject: [1.3] Where can I find operating systems distributions?
From: Available software

This section covers the availability of several well-known systems;
the only criterion for inclusion of a system here is that it be of
interest to some segment of the OS research community (commercial
systems will be accepted for inclusion, so long as they are pertinent
to research).

------------------------------
Subject: [1.3.1] Distributed systems and microkernels
From: Available software

- [93-03-31-22-49.53] As of July 1990 ACE is the distribution, support
  and sales channel for Amoeba.  Due to overwhelming response from
  non-profit organisations wishing to obtain Amoeba for their research
  activities, VU is offering Amoeba 5.1 to research institutions for
  more or less free (via ftp at no charge, or on tape for $500 on
  Exabyte or $800 on QIC-24).  Amoeba currently supports 68020 and
  68030-based VME board machines, as well at i386- and i486-based AT
  PCs and Sun 3 machines.  A port to the SPARC was underway as of late
  1992, and may be complete by now.

  For further information on `commercial' Amoeba, you can contact ACE
  by email at <[e-mail]>, or by fax at [phone].
  Universities interested in obtaining a license should send mail to
  <[e-mail]>, or fax to [phone].

- Chorus Systemes has special programmes for universities interested
  in using Chorus.  For more information on the offerings available,
  conditions, and other details, ftp to ftp.chorus.fr and get the
  following ASCII files:
    pub/README
    pub/academic/README
    pub/academic/offerings

- The Cronus object-oriented distributed system may be obtained via
  ftp from pineapple.bbn.com; email <[e-mail]> for details
  of the account name and password.  Before attempting to get the
  Cronus distribution, you must obtain, via anonymous ftp,
  pineapple.bbn.com:Cronus-via-FTP-Terms.

- Horus is available for research use; contact Ken Birman
  <[e-mail]> or Robbert van Renesse <[e-mail]> for
  details.

- Isis has not been publicly available since 1989, but may (I'm not
  sure) still be obtained using anonymous ftp from ftp.uu.net or
  ftp.cs.cornell.edu.  After 1989, the code was picked up by Isis
  Distributed Systems, which has subsequently developed and supported
  it.  The commercial version of Isis (available at very low cost to
  academic institutions) is available from the company.  Email
  <[e-mail]> for information, or call [phone] or
  [phone].

- [92-09-19-08-55.18] Plan 9 is available to academic institutions on
  CD-ROM; the distribution consists of around 350MB of source and
  binaries.  For information on how to go about getting a license,
  contact

    Neera Kuckreja
    AT&T Bell Laboratories
    Room 2C-557
    Murray Hill, NJ 07974
    United States

  As of September 1992, kernels existed for the Sun SLC, Sun4Cs of
  various types, NeXTstations, MIPS Magnum 3000, SGI 4D series,
  Gateway 486, AT&T Safari, `a whole bunch of' other PCs, and the
  Gnot.

  Sydney University Basser Department of Computer Science has a port
  of Plan 9 underway to the DEC Alpha at the moment.  A port to the
  Sun 3 has been completed.  Contact <[e-mail]> for
  details.

- QNX is available for academic applications through an education
  support programme run by QNX Software Systems, whereby QNX systems
  can be obtained for educational purposes at very low cost.  For
  commercial and education availability and pricing, contact:

    QNX Software Systems        QNX Software Systems
    175 Terrence Matthews Cr.    Westendstr. 19
    Kanata, Ontario K2M 1W8        6000 Frankfurt am Main 1
    Canada                Germany

    1 800 363 9001            [phone] x299
    [phone]
    [phone] (fax)        [phone] (fax)

  Versions after 4.2 of QNX run on the i386 and later processors, with
  a 16-bit kernel included for i286 machines, while version 4.1 will
  run on i286 and above.

- [93-02-07-16-03.48] The Sprite Network Operating System is available
  on CD-ROM.  The disc contains the source code and documentation for
  Sprite, a research operating system developed at the University of
  California, Berkeley.  All the research papers from the Sprite
  project are also included on the disc.  This software on this disc
  is primarily intended for research purposes, and is not really
  intended to be used as a production system.  Boot images are
  provided for Sun SPARCstations and DECstations.  The CD-ROM is in
  ISO-9660 format with Rock Ridge extensions.  The disc contains about
  550 megabytes of software.

  You can get an overview of the Sprite Project, and a complete list
  of what is on this disc by anonymous ftp from
  cdrom.com:pub/cdroms/sprite.

  If you would like a CD-ROM please send $25.  Add $4.95 if you would
  like a caddy too.  S&H is $5 (per order, not per disc) for
  US/Can/Mex, and $10 for overseas.  If you live in California, please
  add sales tax.  You can send a check or money order, or you can
  order with Mastercard/Visa/AmEx.

    Bob Bruce <[e-mail]>
    Walnut Creek CDROM
    1547 Palos Verdes Mall, Suite 260
    Walnut Creek, CA 94596
    United States

       1 800 786-9907 (USA only)
      [phone]
      [phone] (fax)

- VSTa is a copylefted system written by Andrew Valencia
  <[e-mail]> which uses ideas from several research operating
  systems in its implementation.  It is currently in an `experimental
  but usable' state, and supports `lots of' POSIX, and runs on a
  number of different PC configurations.  For further information,
  send mail to <[e-mail]>, or ftp to
  ftp.cygnus.com:pub/embedded/vsta.

[Mach, Chorus, Clouds?, Choices?]

------------------------------
Subject: [1.3.2] Unix lookalikes
From: Available software

- Linux is available via anonymous ftp from tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux
  or sunsite.unc.edu:pub/Linux.  It is a freely-distributable System V
  compatible Unix, and is covered by the GNU General Public License.
  Linux runs on ISA bus PCs with i386 or better CPUs and at least 4
  megabytes to run.

- 386BSD is available via ftp from agate.berkeley.edu:pub/386BSD or
  ftp.uu.net:systems/unix/386BSD.  It lies mid-way between 4.3BSD Reno
  and 4.4BSD internally, and contains no AT&T-copyrighted code.
  386BSD runs on ISA bus PCs with i386 or better CPUs.

- NetBSD is available via ftp from agate.berkeley.edu:pub/NetBSD.

- FreeBSD is available via ftp from freebsd.cdrom.com:pub/FreeBSD,
  ftp.cosy.sbg.ac.at:pub/mirror/FreeBSD, and
  pdq.coe.montana.edu:pub/mirrors/unix/freebsd.

- The Hurd is the GNU operating system, being written by Michael
  Bushnell.  It is based on Mach 3.0, and should be available on most
  systems to which Mach has been ported.

------------------------------
Subject: [1.3.3] Others
From: Available software

[93-03-18-10-19.02] Microsoft is making sources of Windows NT
available under license to universities and research laboratories.
You should have the appropriate officials contact Mark Lewin
<[e-mail]> to get started on this process.



------------------------------
Subject: [2] Performance and workload studies
From: Performance and workload studies

This section covers various different publicly-available traces and
studies, libraries and source distributions, which may be of use.

------------------------------
Subject: [2.1] TCP internetwork traffic characteristics
From: Performance and workload studies

- [92-10-20-15-04.39] Peter Danzig and Sugih Jamin of USC have made
  available a report and a source library which simulates realistic
  day-to-day network traffic between nodes.  The library, tcplib, `is
  motivated by our observation that present-day wide-area tcp/ip
  traffic cannot be accurately modeled with simple analytical
  expressions, but instead requires a combination of detailed
  knowledge of the end-user applications responsible for the traffic
  and certain measured probability distributions'.

  The technical report and the source library it describes are
  available via anonymous ftp from
  jerico.usc.edu:pub/jamin/tcplib.  All you need to transfer to
  use the library are: README, brkdn_dist.h, tcpapps.h, tcplib.1, and
  one of libtcp* that matches your setup.  You need tcplib.tar.Z only
  if you must generate the library yourself.  The file tcplibtr.ps.Z
  is the PostScript version of the report.  The authors may be
  contacted at <[e-mail]>.

- [93-08-09-15-15.54] Vern Paxson of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories
  has a report available via anonymous ftp which describes analytic
  models for wide-area TCP connections based upon a set of wide-area
  traffic traces.  The report may be obtained from
  ftp.ee.lbl.gov:WAN-TCP-models.{1,2}.ps.Z.

- [93-05-13-10-54.09] Vern Paxson also has made available another
  report, ftp.ee.lbl.gov:WAN-TCP-growth-trends.ps.Z, which provides an
  analysis of the growth trends of a medium-sized research
  laboratory's wide-area TCP connections over a period of more than
  two years.

------------------------------
Subject: [2.2] File system traces
From: Performance and workload studies

- Chris Ruemmler has done a study on low-level disk access patterns
  for a workstation, a server, and a time-shared system which appeared
  in the Winter 1993 USENIX proceedings.  A copy may be obtained via
  anonymous ftp from ftp.hpl.hp.com:wilkes/HPL-92-152.ps.Z.

- Stephen Russell <[e-mail]> has instrumented the SunOS 4.1.x
  kernel running on Sun 3 machines.  The system allows time-stamped
  event records to be obtained from various points in the kernel.
  Events can be categorised (eg, paging, file system, etc), and are
  read via pseudo-devices.  Ioctl calls allow substreams to be
  enabled/disabled, buffer status checked, etc.  An external high
  resolution timer is used for timestamping.

- [93-05-09-09-23.32] The traces used in `Measurements of a
  distributed file system' (SOSP 1991) may be obtained via anonymous
  ftp from sprite.berkeley.edu:pub/sosp-traces.  An accompanying
  PostScript file, written by John H. Hartman
  <[e-mail]>, which describes the trace file format,
  how to interpret the trace records, and other information may be
  found in the above directory as sospTraces.ps.Z.

- [93-06-18-13-02.48] Hidehiro Ishii <[e-mail]> has
  written a system which traces the NFS accesses seen by an NFS server
  and calculates statistics based on such traces.  Contact the author
  for details.

------------------------------
Subject: [2.3] Modern Unix file and block sizes
From: Performance and workload studies

The following sections are lifted more or less verbatim from a number
of traces which were co-ordinated and analysed by Gordon Irlam
<[e-mail]>.  The numbers quoted below are based on Unix file
size data for 12 million files, residing on 1000 file systems, with a
total size of 250 gigabytes.

------------------------------
Subject: [2.3.1] File sizes
From: Performance and workload studies

There is no such thing as an average file system.  Some file systems
have lots of little files.  Others have a few big files.  However as a
mental model the notion of an average file system is invaluable.

The following table gives a break down of file sizes and the amount of
space they consume.

   file size       #files  %files  %files   disk space  %space  %space
(max. bytes)                        cumm.         (Mb)           cumm.
           0       147479     1.2     1.2          0.0     0.0     0.0
           1         3288     0.0     1.2          0.0     0.0     0.0
           2         5740     0.0     1.3          0.0     0.0     0.0
           4        10234     0.1     1.4          0.0     0.0     0.0
           8        21217     0.2     1.5          0.1     0.0     0.0
          16        67144     0.6     2.1          0.9     0.0     0.0
          32       231970     1.9     4.0          5.8     0.0     0.0
          64       282079     2.3     6.3         14.3     0.0     0.0
         128       278731     2.3     8.6         26.1     0.0     0.0
         256       512897     4.2    12.9         95.1     0.0     0.1
         512      1284617    10.6    23.5        566.7     0.2     0.3
        1024      1808526    14.9    38.4       1442.8     0.6     0.8
        2048      2397908    19.8    58.1       3554.1     1.4     2.2
        4096      1717869    14.2    72.3       4966.8     1.9     4.1
        8192      1144688     9.4    81.7       6646.6     2.6     6.7
       16384       865126     7.1    88.9      10114.5     3.9    10.6
       32768       574651     4.7    93.6      13420.4     5.2    15.8
       65536       348280     2.9    96.5      16162.6     6.2    22.0
      131072       194864     1.6    98.1      18079.7     7.0    29.0
      262144       112967     0.9    99.0      21055.8     8.1    37.1
      524288        58644     0.5    99.5      21523.9     8.3    45.4
     1048576        32286     0.3    99.8      23652.5     9.1    54.5
     2097152        16140     0.1    99.9      23230.4     9.0    63.5
     4194304         7221     0.1   100.0      20850.3     8.0    71.5
     8388608         2475     0.0   100.0      14042.0     5.4    77.0
    16777216          991     0.0   100.0      11378.8     4.4    81.3
    33554432          479     0.0   100.0      11456.1     4.4    85.8
    67108864          258     0.0   100.0      12555.9     4.8    90.6
   134217728           61     0.0   100.0       5633.3     2.2    92.8
   268435456           29     0.0   100.0       5649.2     2.2    95.0
   536870912           12     0.0   100.0       4419.1     1.7    96.7
  1073741824            7     0.0   100.0       5004.5     1.9    98.6
  2147483647            3     0.0   100.0       3620.8     1.4   100.0

A number of observations can be made:
  - the distribution is heavily skewed towards small files
  - but it has a very long tail
  - the average file size is 22k
  - pick a file at random: it is probably smaller than 2k
  - pick a byte at random: it is probably in a file larger than 512k
  - 89% of files take up 11% of the disk space
  - 11% of files take up 89% of the disk space

Such a heavily skewed distribution of file sizes suggests that, if one
were to design a file system from scratch, it might make sense to
employ radically different strategies for small and large files.

The seductive power of mathematics allows us treat a 200 byte and a
2MB file in the same way.  But do we really want to?  Are there any
problems in engineering where the same techniques would be used in
handling physical objects that span 6 orders of magnitude?

A quote from sci.physics that has stuck with me: `When things change
by 2 orders of magnitude, you are actually dealing with fundamentally
different problems'.

People I trust say they would have expected the tail of the above
distribution to have been even longer.  There are at least some files
in the 1-2G range.  They point out that DBMS shops with really large
files might have been less inclined to respond to a survey like this
than some other sites.  This would bias the disk space figures, but it
would have no appreciable effect on file counts.  The results gathered
would still be valuable because many static disk layout issues are
determined by the distribution of small files and are largely
independent of the potential existence of massive files.

(It should be noted that many popular DBMSs, such as Oracle, Sybase,
 and Informix, use raw disk partitions instead of Unix file systems
 for storing data, hence the difficulty in gathering data about them
 in a uniform way.)

------------------------------
Subject: [2.3.2] Block sizes
From: Performance and workload studies

The last block of a file is normally only partially occupied, and so
as block sizes are increased so too will the the amount of wasted disk
space.

The following historical values for the design of the BSD FFS are
given in `Design and implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix operating
system':

fragment size   overhead
   (bytes)        (%)
      512         4.2
     1024         9.1
     2048        19.7
     4096        42.9

Files have clearly gotten larger since then; I obtained the following
results:
fragment size   overhead
   (bytes)        (%)
      128         0.3
      256         0.6
      512         1.1
     1024         2.5
     2048         5.4
     4096        12.3
     8192        27.8
    16384        61.2

By default the BSD FFS typically uses a 1k fragment size.  Perhaps
this size is no longer optimal and should be increased.

(The FFS block size is constrained to be no more than 8 times the
 fragment size.  Clustering is a good way to improve throughput for
 FFS based file systems, but it doesn't do very much to reduce the not
 insignificant FFS computational overhead.)

It is interesting to note that even though most files are less than 2K
in size, having a 2K block size wastes very little space, because disk
space consumption is so totally dominated by large files.

------------------------------
Subject: [2.3.3] Inode ratios
From: Performance and workload studies

The BSD FFS statically allocates inodes.  By default one inode is
allocated for every 2K of disk space.  Since an inode consumes 128
bytes this means that by default 6.25% of disk space is consumed by
inodes.

It is important not to run out of inodes since any remaining disk
space is then effectively wasted.  Despite this allocating 1 inode for
every 2K is excessive.

For each file system studied I worked out the minimum sized disk it
could be placed on.  Most disks needed to be only marginally larger
than the size of their files, but a few disks, having much smaller
files than average, needed a much larger disk---a small disk had
insufficient inodes.

bytes per   overhead
  inode       (%)
   1024      12.5
   2048       6.3
   3072       4.5
   4096       4.2
   5120       4.4
   6144       4.9
   7168       5.5
   8192       6.3
   9216       7.2
  10240       8.3
  11264       9.5
  12288      10.9
  13312      12.7
  14336      14.6
  15360      16.7
  16384      19.1
  17408      21.7
  18432      24.4
  19456      27.4
  20480      30.5

Clearly, the current default of one inode for every 2K of data is too
small.  Earlier results suggested that allocating one inode for every
5-6k was in some sense optimal, and allocating one inode for every 8k
would only be 0.4% worse.  The new data suggests one inode for every
4k is optimal, and allocating one inode for every 8k would be 2.1%
worse.

The analysis technique I used is very sensitive to even a few file
systems with very small files.

The main source of file systems with lots of small files would appear
to be netnews servers.  The typical Usenet message would appear to be
1-2k in length.  Ignoring such file systems would drastically alter
the conclusions I reach.  If, as I believe might already be the case,
news servers are manually tuned to have a lower than normal bytes per
inode ratio, it would then be possible to justify setting the default
ratio much higher.

Clearly it is best if the file system dynamically allocate inodes; I
believe AIX does this for instance.  Systems that statically allocate
inodes should probably increase the bytes per inode ratio, but it is
not clear to exactly what value.  The engineer in me says `it is
important to play this one conservatively: stick to 6k', the artist
goes `as Chris Torek says: aesthetics, 8k'.



------------------------------
Subject: [3] Papers, reports, and bibliographies
From: Papers, reports, and bibliographies

Network-available documents are listed in this section.  I'd like to
see information for obtaining other sets of reports which aren't
electronically-available included here as well, at some stage.

------------------------------
Subject: [3.1] From where are papers for distributed systems available?
From: Papers, reports, and bibliographies

Amoeba
    ftp.cs.vu.nl:amoeba
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/amoeba

Arjuna
    arjuna.ncl.ac.uk:pub/Arjuna

Choices
    choices.cs.uiuc.edu:Papers

Chorus
    ftp.chorus.fr:pub/chorus-reports
    cse.ogi.edu:pub/chorus/reports

Clouds
    helios.cc.gatech.edu:pub/papers

Cronus
    pineapple.bbn.com:doc

Guide
    imag.fr:pub/GUIDE/doc

Horus
    ftp.cs.cornell.edu:pub/Horus

Isis
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/bib/isis.bib
    ftp.cs.cornell.edu:pub

Mach
    mach.cs.cmu.edu:doc

Plan 9
    research.att.com:dist/plan9doc
    research.att.com:dist/plan9man

Spring
    http://www.sun.com/smli

X kernel
    cs.arizona.edu:pub/xkernel

Papers covering Amoeba, Choices, Chorus, Clouds, the Hurd, Guide,
Mach, Mars, NonStop, and Plan 9 are also available via anonymous ftp
from nic.funet.fi:pub/doc/OS.

[I'd like to find the authoritative home for V---Mars and NonStop are
 a bit more obscure, I think; they certainly aren't asked after much]

------------------------------
Subject: [3.2] Where can I find other papers?
From: Papers, reports, and bibliographies

QNX [93-09-19-22-22.26]
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/qnx

Solaris 2.x [93-02-23-12-12.43]
    opcom.sun.ca:pub/docs/papers
    opcom.sun.ca:pub/docs/solaris

Windows NT [92-09-18-11-46.16]
    ftp.uu.net:vendor/microsoft/win32-api
    ftp.uu.net:vendor/microsoft/isv-communications

------------------------------
Subject: [3.3] Where can I find bibliographies?
From: Papers, reports, and bibliographies

Load balancing
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/bib/load-balancing.bib

Object-oriented operating systems
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/bib/ooos.bib.Z
    ftp.inria.fr:INRIA/bib/ooos.bib.gz

Parallel and distributed I/O
    ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/bib/io.bib

Recommended books
    ftp.maths.tcd.ie:pub/bosullvn/comp.os.research/recommended.bib

Sprite network operating system
    sprite.berkeley.edu:pub/sprite

See also the section on General Net Resources.

[There's quite a lot more at ftp.cse.ucsc.edu, if anyone wants to add
 more to this list.]



------------------------------
Subject: [4] General Internet-accessible resources
From: General Internet-accessible resources

This section contains information about a variety of services
available to the OS research community via the Internet.

------------------------------
Subject: [4.1] Wide Area Information Service (WAIS) and World-Wide Web (WWW) servers
From: General Internet-accessible resources

[92-09-21-16-38.23] Loughborough University high-performance
networking and distributed systems archive may be accessed via World
Wide Web at http://genie.lut.ac.uk.  This archive contains, according
to Jon Knight <[e-mail]>, the organiser:

- Technical reports and papers written at LUT by the networks and
  distributed systems researchers in the Department of Computer
  Studies.

- Technical reports, papers and theses which have been produced at
  other sites and then made available for public electronic access.

- Software which is of use in research or which has been produced by a
  specific research project.

- Details of relevant conferences, collected from a variety of sources
  (USENET, email, flyers, etc).

- Information on ongoing research projects.

- Bibliographies that have been generated for research at LUT and also
  access to other WAIS indexed bibliographies, both at LUT and
  elsewhere.

- A list of contacts in the field, with details of their research
  interests.  This is entirely voluntary (i.e. people have agreed to
  Jon entering their details rather than him just rooting round the
  Internet to build up the information).

[93-02-18-21-18.31] Postings to comp.os.research since 1988 may be
found via WAIS at UCSC's Computer Science gopher hole:
    (:source
     :version  3
     :ip-address "128.114.134.19"
     :ip-name "ftp.cse.ucsc.edu"
     :tcp-port 210
     :database-name "comp-os-research"
     :cost 0.00
     :cost-unit :free
     :maintainer "[e-mail]"

     :description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5
        on Jul 9 03:51:11 1992 by [e-mail]
        The files of type netnews used in the index
        were: /home/ftp/pub/comp.os.research"
    )

Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department has a home
page for the Mach project at the following URL:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/public/www/mach.html.

Bibliographies in the comp.os.research collection are accessible via
WAIS from UCSC:
    (:source
     :version  3
     :ip-address "128.114.134.19"
     :ip-name "ftp.cse.ucsc.edu"
     :tcp-port 210
     :database-name "os-bibliographies"
     :cost 0.00
     :cost-unit :free
     :maintainer "[e-mail]"
     :description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5
        on Jul 9 22:38:27 1992 by [e-mail]
        The files of type bibtex used in the index
        were: /home/ftp/pub/bib"
    )


------------------------------
Subject: [4.2] Refdbms---a distributed bibliographic database system
From: General Internet-accessible resources

[92-10-01-11-39.32] The alpha release of refdbms version 3, developed
by John Wilkes of the Concurrent Systems Project at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories and Richard Golding of the Concurrent Systems Laboratory
at UC Santa Cruz, is now available.  It can be obtained by anonymous
ftp from ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/refdbms.  The system has been tested on
Sun 3 and 4 systems running SunOS 4.1.x, and on DECstations running
Ultrix 4.1.  It is an experiment in building weak-consistency
wide-area distributed applications, and the databases currently
available for the system have a good systems coverage.

The system includes tools to query the database, to produce
bibliographies for LaTeX documents, and to enter new references into
the database.  It is part of ongoing research into wide-area
distributed information systems on the Internet.

Features include:

- Distributed databases: a reference database can be shared among
  multiple sites.  Updates can be entered at any site, and will be
  propagated to the other sites holding a replica of the database.

- Multiple databases: every database has a name, and users specify the
  order in which databases will be searched.

- Private databases: databases can be private, available site-wide, or
  they can be made available to other sites.

- Database query by keyword, author, and title word.

- Translator for refer-format databases.

- Usable with LaTeX documents: the internal refdbms format can be
  translated into a special BibTeX format.

An up-to-date list of bibliographies exported by various institutions
may be obtained using anonymous ftp from
ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/refdbms/current-databases.


------------------------------
Subject: [4.3] The comp.os.research archive
From: General Internet-accessible resources

An archive of all messages posted to comp.os.research since 1988 is
maintained at UC Santa Cruz.  It may be accessed via anonymous ftp at
ftp.cse.ucsc.edu:pub/comp.os.research.  The archive is organised
by year.