Advantages of Distributed Operating Systems Assignment

Advantages of Distributed Operating Systems - Assignment Example For instance, the design of distributed systems is such that a malicious program can easily be replicated across a large number of machines, and this can result in major damage (Moffett, 2004). To this extent, although distributed operating systems might attempt to enhance high reliability through fault tolerance, it is however clear that fault tolerance is hard to achieve. Secondly, the distributed operating systems are designed with the aim of enhancing performance. Evidence however shows that this is particularly a challenging concept since as these systems attempt to enhance performance; they actually end up conflicting with other properties, especially the reliability and security of the system. For example, in Amoeba distributed operating system, there are many applications that are replicated, an example being the databases (Tanenbaum, et al, 1990). These replications help this operating system to support fault tolerance, there enhancing its performance and reliability. However, it should be noted that as the software and hardware components are increased to enhance fault tolerance, this may end up negatively affecting the security and overall performance of the system. Third, there is evidence to show that indeed distributed operating systems helps to enhance communication. In many of these systems, communication is mainly through messages. This allows for communication in distributed operating system easy and efficient. In many cases, the communication needs in distributed operating systems are of the request/response type (Mullender, 1988). This allows for message passing to be embedded in protocols for the remote operations. In this case, a process sends a request to another process and the request is carried out and the response returned to the initial process. Through such a mechanism, the communication process in a distributed