DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Principles and Paradigms

Second Edition
ANDREW S. TANENBAUM
MAARTEN VAN STEEN

Chapter 3
Processes

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Thread Usage in Nondistributed Systems

Figure 3-1. Context switching as the result of IPC.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Thread Implementation

Figure 3-2. Combining kernel-level lightweight

processes and user-level threads.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Multithreaded Servers (1)

Figure 3-3. A multithreaded server organized in a

dispatcher/worker model.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Multithreaded Servers (2)

Figure 3-4. Three ways to construct a server.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 The Role of Virtualization in
Distributed Systems

Figure 3-5. (a) General organization between a program, interface,

and system. (b) General organization of virtualizing system A on
top of system B.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Architectures of Virtual Machines (1)

Interfaces at different levels

• An interface between the hardware and
software consisting of machine instructions
– that can be invoked by any program.
• An interface between the hardware and
software, consisting of machine instructions
– that can be invoked only by privileged programs,
such as an operating system.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Architectures of Virtual Machines (2)

Interfaces at different levels

• An interface consisting of system calls as
offered by an operating system.
• An interface consisting of library calls
– generally forming what is known as an application
programming interface (API).
– In many cases, the aforementioned system calls
are hidden by an API.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Architectures of Virtual Machines (3)

Figure 3-6. Various interfaces offered by computer systems.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Architectures of Virtual Machines (4)

Figure 3-7. (a) A process virtual machine, with multiple

instances of (application, runtime) combinations.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Architectures of Virtual Machines (5)

Figure 3-7. (b) A virtual machine monitor, with multiple instances

of (applications, operating system) combinations.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Networked User Interfaces (1)

Figure 3-8. (a) A networked application with its own protocol.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Networked User Interfaces (2)

Figure 3-8. (b) A general solution to allow access

to remote applications.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Example: The XWindow System

Figure 3-9. The basic organization of theXWindow System.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Client-Side Software for Distribution
Transparency

Figure 3-10. Transparent replication of a server

using a client-side solution.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 General Design Issues (1)

Figure 3-11. (a) Client-to-server binding using a daemon.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 General Design Issues (2)

Figure 3-11. (b) Client-to-server binding using a superserver.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Server Clusters (1)

Figure 3-12. The general organization of a

three-tiered server cluster.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Server Clusters (2)

Figure 3-13. The principle of TCP handoff.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Distributed Servers

Figure 3-14. Route optimization in a distributed server.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Managing Server Clusters
Example: PlanetLab

Figure 3-15. The basic organization of a PlanetLab node.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 PlanetLab (1)
PlanetLab management issues:
• Nodes belong to different organizations.
– Each organization should be allowed to specify who
is allowed to run applications on their nodes,
– And restrict resource usage appropriately.
• Monitoring tools available assume a very
specific combination of hardware and software.
– All tailored to be used within a single organization.
• Programs from different slices but running on
the same node should not interfere with each
other.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 PlanetLab (2)

Figure 3-16. The management relationships

between various PlanetLab entities.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 PlanetLab (3)

Relationships between PlanetLab entities:

• A node owner puts its node under the regime of a
management authority, possibly restricting usage
where appropriate.
• A management authority provides the necessary
software to add a node to PlanetLab.
• A service provider registers itself with a
management authority, trusting it to provide well-
behaving nodes.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 PlanetLab (4)
Relationships between PlanetLab entities:
• A service provider contacts a slice authority to
create a slice on a collection of nodes.
• The slice authority needs to authenticate the
service provider.
• A node owner provides a slice creation service
for a slice authority to create slices. It essentially
delegates resource management to the slice
authority.
• A management authority delegates the creation
of slices to a slice authority.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Reasons for Migrating Code

Figure 3-17. The principle of dynamically configuring a client to communicate

to a server. The client first fetches the necessary software, and then
invokes the server.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Models for Code Migration

Figure 3-18. Alternatives for code migration.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
 Migration and Local Resources

Figure 3-19. Actions to be taken with respect to the references to

local resources when migrating code to another machine.
Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5
Migration in Heterogeneous Systems

Three ways to handle migration (which can be combined)

• Pushing memory pages to the new machine and

resending the ones that are later modified during the
migration process.
• Stopping the current virtual machine; migrate memory,
and start the new virtual machine.
• Letting the new virtual machine pull in new pages as
needed, that is, let processes start on the new virtual
machine immediately and copy memory pages on
demand.

Tanenbaum & Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2e, (c) 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-239227-5