An Approach to Executive System Maintenance in Disk-Based Systems

The use of disk files as the resident store for executive system components has presented particular problems in the areas of system integrity and system maintenance. The former is easily met with conventional techniques, but the latter is more difficult because of the need to optimize diskallocation at the time the system is edited in order to minimize access time to system components. However, the time required to produce an optimally allocated system edit is prohibitive for debugging purposes. An approach to solving this problem is to develop a quick patch editing facility which can be used at any point in the job stream for debugging purposes, and to use the conventional, slow facility only when a permanent change is needed. A particular implementation of the quick editor is described in detail, and the extension of this kind of facility for time-sharing systems is discussed.