Providing efficient device driver support in the Fluke operating system presents novel challenges, which stem from two conflicting factors: (i) a design and maintenance requirement to reuse unmodified legacy device drivers, and (ii) the mismatch between the Fluke kernel's internal execution environment and the execution environment expected by these legacy device drivers. This thesis presents a solution to this conflict: a framework whose design is based on running device drivers as usermode servers, which resolves the fundamental execution environment mismatch. This approach

Distributed systems such as client-server applications and cluster-based parallel computation are an important part of modern computing. Distributed computing allows the balancing of processing load, increases program modularity, isolates functionality, and can provide an element of fault tolerance. In these environments, systems must be able to synchronize and share data through some mechanism for remote interprocess communication (IPC). Although distributed systems have many advantages, they also pose several challenges. One important challenge is transparency. It is desirable that applications can be written to a communication interface that hides the details of distribution. One way to achieve transparency is through the extension of local communication mechanisms over a network for remote communication. The ability to transparently extend local communication depends on the semantics of the local IPC mechanisms. Unfortunately, those semantics are often driven by other architectural...