Re: bgb, references for mailing lists?...

[Neil W. Van Dyke]

This may be a bit off-topic for Guile...

If you want a starting point for OS experimentations, you might take a
look at OSKit ("http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/";).  Reportedly, the
author of MzScheme was able to make a proof-of-concept bootable Scheme
system in a matter of hours using OSKit.  You may have similar luck with
putting Guile atop OSKit and/or extending OSKit with your object store
ideas.

Research-wise, I'm not a specialist on the topic, but I suspect
searching CS literature for terms like "persistent object store",
"distributed object", "replication", etc., might provide some useful
background information and help you contextualize and articulate what
problem(s) you want to explore.  Reading recent conference proceedings
will suggest what problems other researchers currently find most
interesting and what they're working on.

For a practical system intended to be production quality rather than a
research prototype, you might take a look at what the InterMezzo project
("http://www.inter-mezzo.org/";) is doing for replicating filesystems on
Linux.

Good luck.

-- 
                                                        Neil W. Van Dyke
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/