This thesis describes the characteristics of the experimental operating system, KANIX and its hardware architecture. KANIX is the modified version of UNIX and it is the modular and massage-oriented O.S.
The modularity is achieved by dividing its entire function into several servers and this approach is selected because of VLSI's dramatic hardware cost reductions.
Each server consists of the kernel, which composed of the interrupt handling system, message system, semaphore system and memory management system, and processes which perform the privileged functions of each server.
The hardware architecture has the tightly coupled form, which is required in many aspects-speed, throughput, reliability etc.
It is a time-shared bus system, which consists of a global bus, global memories and multiple processor units. Also it includes several local buses and memories which are subjected to each processor unit.
