Operating system level support for resource sharing across multiple domains

On demand resources sharing is a fundamental requirement for distributed systems. However, the existence of multiple administrative domains makes it hard to share resources among these domains dynamically. We think an important reason is domain-dependent user management in traditional operating systems, and previous middleware approaches can not solve the problem thoroughly. In this paper, we propose cross-domain operating system to implement domain-independent user management at the operating system level. Following methods are adopted to achieve the goal: 1) using global user identifiers to replace traditional user identifiers; 2) implanting global user identifiers into kernel entities such as processes and files; 3) adopting an access control mechanism based on global user identifiers. The most important feature of our approach is that we implement it by introducing innovative elements into operating system kernels. Compared with middleware approaches, our method can provide better security, performance and compatibility