This authoritative and concise report summarizes the findings of the V distributed operating system project at Stanford University. The V distributed system project was developed to explore directions for the future design of integrated operating and communication systems.

The focus of V is the interrelationship of operating system and communication tasks, namely I/O, memory management, naming, and interprocess communication. Unlike operating system designers of the past, the V system designers used a hardware model (backplane design) as a basis for constructing a software model.

This model has three tenets: (1) high-performance communication is the most critical facility for distributed systems; (2) the protocols, not the software, define the system; and (3) a relatively small operating system kernel can implement the basic protocols and services, providing a simple network-transparent process, address space, and communication model.

Unlike many writers on this subject, the author presents a readable, straightforward analysis of the real problems associated with software system design. Cheriton’s report discusses the approaches that work and those that failed.

This paper should be of interest to both academics and practicing engineers who are interested in some of the current theoretical research dealing with the design of networks as a system.