Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

1.1. Inherently concurrent systems

Systems which must respond to, or manage, simultaneous activities in their external environment are inherently concurrent and may broadly be classified as:

• real-time and embedded systems (special-purpose operating systems);

• operating systems (OSs);

• distributed operating systems (the OS components are distributed);

• database management and transaction processing systems (run above operating systems);

• distributed, application-level services.

The implementation of a system may be centralized, running on a single computer (which may also be termed a host or node), or may be distributed over a number of computers. The user interface to a system may make its support for concurrent activities explicit.

1.1.1. Real-time ...