This paper discusses K42, a highly-customizable object-oriented operating system. K42 was designed to address some technology predictions made by the authors, including the rise of multiprocessors and 64-bit machines. One of the goals of K42 was the ability to scale up with multiprocessors, which was achieved through minimizing sharing using techniques like Protected Procedure Calls and clustered objects, and affected the design of memory management. K42's design places a lot of importance on locality and customizability; the latter feature is a really interesting one in that K42 allows each instance of a resource to be managed by different sets of object instances.
Also supported is dynamic customization through hot swapping and dynamic upgrade. K42 reduces system calls and storage/pinned memory in the kernel by moving thread-scheduling into user-space. However, this user-level scheduling creates problems when using pthreads. Though Windows was predicted to dominate the market, the authors decided to provide Linux compatibility in K42.
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