Editing Genera (operating system) (section)

== Features ==
Genera also has support for various network protocols and applications using those. It has extensive support for [[Internet protocol suite|TCP/IP]].

Genera supports one-processor machines with several threads (called ''processes'').

Genera supports several different types of [[garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]] (GC): full GC, in-place GC, incremental GC, and ephemeral GC. The ephemeral collector uses only physical memory and uses the [[memory management]] unit to get information about changed pages in physical memory. The collector uses generations and the virtual memory is divided into areas. Areas can contain objects of certain types (strings, bitmaps, pathnames, ...), and each area can use different memory management mechanisms.

Genera implements two [[file system]]s: the FEP file system for large files and the ''Lisp Machine File System'' (LMFS) optimized for many small files. These systems also maintain different versions of files. If a file is modified, Genera still keeps the old versions. Genera also provides access to, can read from and write to, other, local and remote, file systems including: NFS, FTP, HFS, CD-ROMs, [[tape drive]]s.

Genera supports netbooting.

Genera provides a client for the ''Statice'' [[object database]] from Symbolics.

Genera makes extensive use of the ''condition system'' (exception handling) to handle all kinds of runtime errors and is able to recover from many of these errors. For example, it allows retrying network operations if a network connection has a failure; the application code will keep running. When errors occur, users are presented a menu of restarts (abort, retry, continue options) that are specific to the error signalled.

Genera has extensive debugging tools.

Genera can save versions of the running system to ''worlds''. These worlds can be booted and then will contain all the saved data and code.