Abstract

Naming plays a key role in the design of any system that exports services or resources. Object systems may export many different categories of names: instances, components of records, types, etc. Operating systems export the names of files, devices, and services. Integrating an object base with existing operating system facilities can improve accessibility of the object base resources. We consider the benefits and pitfalls of integrating an object base namespace with the Unix namespace. 1 1 Introduction Naming plays an important role in modern systems design. Uniform naming of files and devices, long recognized as an important innovation, was first made widely available by the Unix 2 [RT78] operating system. Newer systems such as Plan 9[PPT + 93] extend uniform naming to most system resources, including network connections, processes, etc. Object bases export names for a wide variety of smaller grain entities, such as instances, components of types, types, etc. Object bases share...

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