What might help here is hardware FIFOs between components, sorta
like the Auspex hardware (which is also a message passing distributed OS).
>
>The only slightly cool thing that could arise out of this would be a
>truly heterogeneous multiprocessor; with a little extension, one machine
>could call OS services on another machine via the protocol layer. This
>might be desirable for distributed-memory systems except for the fact that one
>bad kernel call could bring down all the machines in the cluster.
>
Again, see the Auspex model. That is heterogenous processors in a
distributed model (connected by a souped up VME backplane). Last I heard
they finally did solve the 'one bad processor dragging down the system'
problem.
A message passing distributed component system would be cool. I2O
*could* offer a software framework. So could a lot of other frameworks.