AbstractShared memory is a simple yet powerful paradigm for structuring systems. Recently, there has been an interest in extending this paradigm to non‐shared memory architectures as well. For example, the virtual address spaces for all objects in a distributed object‐based system could be viewed as constituting a globaldistributed shared memory. We propose a set of primitives for managing distributed shared memory. We present an implementation of these primitives in the context of an object‐based operating system as well as on top of Unix.