Chorus Systemes SA unveils a binary makeover of its product line as Componentized OS; a set of microkernel operating system components for real-time embedded systems applications which it says existing customers have asked for. The company has worked with Alcatel SA, L M Ericsson Telefon AB, GEC-Alsthom SA, Philips Electronics NV and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG – its partners in the European Union’s Stream Scaleable Technology for the Real-time Embedded Application Marketplace project – to break the baseline Chorus/OS microkernel apart into offerings for the low end, mid-range and high end of the market. It is targeting everything from fault-tolerant server vendors, PABXs, Asynchronous Transfer Mode and other switching systems, interactive television servers, set-top boxes, portable phones and embedded controllers. Chorus/Micro is designed for dedicated application environments such as line boards, portable phone and hand-held devices with a footprint of around 10Kb. It will be available on Motorola Inc 68000 and Intel Corp iAPX-86 instruction sets from the first quarter of next year. Chorus/ClassiX is designed for single system environments that have multiple boards or distributed configurations. Each system is said to be capable of running multiple real-time applications and supporting different operating system application programming interfaces. ClassiX r2B is an enhanced binary version of the original ClassiX (CI No 2,566), and runs on iAPX-86, 68000 and Sparc now. A PowerPC version is due in June. It is also going up on UltraSparc and the microSparc IIep from the fourth quarter. ClassiX r3 will be up on iAPX-86 in the fourth quarter with PowerPC and Sparc implementations following three to six months later. Prices go from $9,500 to $25,000. Run-time licenses are $25 to $163 for 1,000-up depending on functionality included. The multi-system Chorus/Fusion also supports Unix applications and has been available since mid-1995 on iAPX-86. A new release based on the MK2 project under way with Santa Cruz Operation Inc is due by mid-1997. Chorus’s Cool object request broker development system costs from $1,000 to $4,500. Run-time licenses will go from $5 to $100 depending on quantity. Chorus is also publishing the Unix, Posix, real-time profile, distributed object, legacy operating system and simple executive application programming interfaces resulting from the $11m Stream project, claiming they’ll enable telecommunications companies and real-time outfits to integrate off-the-shelf software. Stream is project 8305 of the European Union’s Esprit Open Microprocessor Initiative. The system programming interfaces and the hardware abstraction layer are due to be published when Stream concludes its work in June.
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