QUOTE
Barrelfish
The Barrelfish Operating System
Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
For more information, please read our research papers below and see the FAQ.
Details:
http://barrelfish.org/
The Barrelfish Operating System
Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
For more information, please read our research papers below and see the FAQ.
Details:
http://barrelfish.org/
QUOTE
Singularity
OS and tools for building dependable systems
"...it is impossible to predict how a singularity will affect objects in its causal future." - NCSA Cyberia Glossary
What's New?
The Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 2.0 is now available for academic non-commercial use. You can download it from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website, here.
Our recent article in Operating Systems Review, Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack, is a concise introduction to the Singularity project. It summarizes research in the current Singularity releases and highlights ongoing Singularity research.
Overview
Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.
Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel’s address space.
Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.
More:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
OS and tools for building dependable systems
"...it is impossible to predict how a singularity will affect objects in its causal future." - NCSA Cyberia Glossary
What's New?
The Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 2.0 is now available for academic non-commercial use. You can download it from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website, here.
Our recent article in Operating Systems Review, Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack, is a concise introduction to the Singularity project. It summarizes research in the current Singularity releases and highlights ongoing Singularity research.
Overview
Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.
Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel’s address space.
Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.
More:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
QUOTE
Midori
Windows Successor Requires Additional Research
By Michael Cherry [bio]
Posted: Oct. 13, 2008
Illustration: Singularity Components
Illustration: MinWin Components
The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.
Groups within Microsoft are researching new OS technology, such as Singularity and Midori, designed to overcome the limitations of the current generation of software and to exploit changes in hardware, networking, and how people use computers. Although some of this OS research will find its way into future versions of Windows, a completely new Microsoft OS to replace Windows is likely a long way off. Meantime, Microsoft will continue to make incremental improvements to Windows by exploring smaller builds such as MinWin and Server Core.
New OS Research
While the Windows team works to release service packs, critical security updates, out-of-band features, and new versions of the Windows client and server OSs, other groups in Microsoft continue to explore the longer-term future of the OS. Microsoft Research is working on Singularity, a new OS concept emphasizing high reliability, and another group is attempting to use the Singularity base to build a fully functional OS, code-named Midori.
Singularity
According to Microsoft Research, Singularity is a research project designed to answer the question: "What would a software platform look like if it were designed for dependability instead of current goals, such as performance?"
Included in this research is an OS prototype developed to study how technologies such as programming languages can work with the OS to specify and verify an executing program's behavior.
Singularity is built from three key components: a kernel, software-isolated processes, and channels. (For an illustration depicting the relationship between the three parts, see "Singularity Components".)
...
Midori
Software Development Times, in a story based on documents from the Microsoft Technical Strategy team, reports that "Midori is an offshoot of the Singularity OS, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process."
Microsoft confirms that Midori is an incubation product under the leadership of Eric Rudder, senior vice-president of technical strategy, but the company is not commenting further. In this information vacuum rumors flourish, making it hard to understand what Midori is, and what it is not.
Incremental Improvements
Designing, developing, and testing a new OS can take years. Even as in the case of Singularity, where there is a bootable kernel and low-level functionality, many critical decisions remain, such as which processors the OS will run on, which APIs will be supported, how to handle backwards compatibility, and which features will be exposed to users from a command line or graphical interface. Therefore, Microsoft has to work in parallel to design new OSs for the future, while continuing to make incremental improvements to the existing Windows OS as shown by Windows MinWin and Server Core efforts.
...
More:
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/sampl...v/1108wsrar.htm
Windows Successor Requires Additional Research
By Michael Cherry [bio]
Posted: Oct. 13, 2008
Illustration: Singularity Components
Illustration: MinWin Components
The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.
Groups within Microsoft are researching new OS technology, such as Singularity and Midori, designed to overcome the limitations of the current generation of software and to exploit changes in hardware, networking, and how people use computers. Although some of this OS research will find its way into future versions of Windows, a completely new Microsoft OS to replace Windows is likely a long way off. Meantime, Microsoft will continue to make incremental improvements to Windows by exploring smaller builds such as MinWin and Server Core.
New OS Research
While the Windows team works to release service packs, critical security updates, out-of-band features, and new versions of the Windows client and server OSs, other groups in Microsoft continue to explore the longer-term future of the OS. Microsoft Research is working on Singularity, a new OS concept emphasizing high reliability, and another group is attempting to use the Singularity base to build a fully functional OS, code-named Midori.
Singularity
According to Microsoft Research, Singularity is a research project designed to answer the question: "What would a software platform look like if it were designed for dependability instead of current goals, such as performance?"
Included in this research is an OS prototype developed to study how technologies such as programming languages can work with the OS to specify and verify an executing program's behavior.
Singularity is built from three key components: a kernel, software-isolated processes, and channels. (For an illustration depicting the relationship between the three parts, see "Singularity Components".)
...
Midori
Software Development Times, in a story based on documents from the Microsoft Technical Strategy team, reports that "Midori is an offshoot of the Singularity OS, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process."
Microsoft confirms that Midori is an incubation product under the leadership of Eric Rudder, senior vice-president of technical strategy, but the company is not commenting further. In this information vacuum rumors flourish, making it hard to understand what Midori is, and what it is not.
Incremental Improvements
Designing, developing, and testing a new OS can take years. Even as in the case of Singularity, where there is a bootable kernel and low-level functionality, many critical decisions remain, such as which processors the OS will run on, which APIs will be supported, how to handle backwards compatibility, and which features will be exposed to users from a command line or graphical interface. Therefore, Microsoft has to work in parallel to design new OSs for the future, while continuing to make incremental improvements to the existing Windows OS as shown by Windows MinWin and Server Core efforts.
...
More:
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/sampl...v/1108wsrar.htm