Operating System Support for Persistent Systems: Past, Present and Future

Since the 1980s, various groups have been constructing systems that support a concept known as orthogonal persistence. These systems support objects whose lifetime is independent of the context in which they were created. The benefits of such systems include greater run-time efficiency, strong semantic guarantees about the existence of data and its type, early error checking, and lower construction costs. However, the implementation of persistent systems has been hindered by the lack of support provided by the operating system. This paper examines the implementation of persistent systems on traditional operating systems and on operating systems that directly support persistence, and looks at current attempts to provide flexible architectures that permit persistence to be provided efficiently above the operating system. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.