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OSKit 0.96 was released today
Go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/
and follow your nose for all the goodies.
Briefly: it's up to 30 component libraries now, comes with 45 example
mini-kernels, a 500 page (help!) document with few blank pages anymore
(although still lots of gaps in it), can be configured with full
multithreading and Posix threads, has prototype CPU inheritance scheduling
in it (5 policies including 2 real time), has a hierarchical network
link-sharing component, has a "simple virtual memory" component including
pageout. Has most Linux filesystems, several networking libs, the full
FreeBSD library (which means most of Posix), lots of device drivers (perhaps
60), profiling support, and some minimal video and window manager support.
A currently inelegant but useful component lets you run many kernels on Unix
in user-mode, which is great for debugging. Most components now use the COM
object model, which is a first in internal OS design.
Just about every component is optional, and unlike any other OS, is designed
to fit into *other* operating systems and environments if desired. Of
course the OSKit's got problems, too, don't we all. There are a ton of
things that it needs. One nice thing in that regard is that it's easy to
incrementally add to the OSKit. Let's do it!
Re licensing, the OSKit comes with full source, and is GPL'ed; "open
source" is now the "in" term apparently. If a business or someone has
trouble with the GPL, the University is willing to talk about other options.
As a special holiday bonus-- for such patience on your part-- this release
supports a version, which we provide, of the Kaffe OpenVM (Java to you) from
Transvirtual. Thus you can link them together and you've got Kaffe on the
bare HW, or with a configuration change, you can run the same "Java OS" on
top of Unix. Our Kaffe changes will go into the next beta release.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson and their company for giving Kaffe to the world.
We are grateful to the long line of free software project from whom we drew
code, including Mach, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and XFree86. The GNU build
tools were, as always, invaluable. DARPA's support has been great.
Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge the fine team at Utah that has
accomplished so much, and with whom I have the honor to work with. Check
out the CREDITS file for their names.
Jay Lepreau
University of Utah
lepreau@cs.utah.edu
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