The Open Software Foundation is going to be showing off some of its preliminary microkernel work for the first time in public next week at the UniForum exhibition. Whether the Foundation moved up its schedule because of Unix System Laboratories Inc’s recent tie-up with Chorus Systemes SA, or whether Unix System Labs shotgunned its marriage to Chorus because the Foundation was playing with microkernels, has now become pretty much a chicken and egg puzzle. The software going on display is based on Carnegie-Mellon University’s 3.0 iteration of Mach, which is said to be devoid of any Unix code that requires a Unix Labs licence. The microkernel effort is a project of the Foundation’s Research Institute, aided and abetted by the Consortium’s Grenoble arm, Carnegie, and independent consultant Mt Xinu Inc, which has been working to make the academic Carnegie code more robust and efficient. It is still, however, far from a commercial product, although one insider called its current state reasonable. The team is reportedly moving towards an engineering release, expecting to deliver source code to OEM customers as an experimental research tool next quarter. Possibly a real development kit could be available as quickly as six months from now, the insider said. The Foundation founders, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, as well as the Japanese are reportedly interested in microkernel’s development, but the Foundation is getting much of its impetus for the work from Intel Corp, which is using it in is massively parallel Paragon project. The Foundation is still at the single server stage of development and will be showing the Berkeley System Distribution, BSD, version of Unix, OSF/1 and MS-DOS – each apparently a server – in separate windows capable of some document exchange. It has yet to progress – although the Foundation is reportedly working on it – to the multi-server stage where all the networking, say, or files – independent of the various operating systems – are compartmentalised as separate servers. The software will be shown by the Foundation and Mt Xinu running on 80386 and 80486 machines seeking to get feedback from the market. Unlike Chorus, said to be the only commercialised microkernel, Mach’s strengths are thought not to lie in real-time or distributed environments, so it will undoubtedly be used in different applications.
