A new European initiative to push the future direction of operating systems is set to be announced today, with the announcement of Ouverture – a $17.5m project supported by the European Commission for the European Communities’ Esprit programme. Involved in the project are systems vendors Alacatel Alsthom SA, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV, owner of the Transputer, and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, with the technology provider Chorus Systemes SA of Paris. Unix System Laboratories Inc, which has a stake in Chorus, and Unix International Inc are also supporting the effort, which aims to integrate the Chorus/Mix microkernel into Unix System V.4. The work is expected to be applicable to the mainstream Unix market as well as real-time embedded systems and high performance parallel processing systems. Object-oriented interfaces will also be added to the Chorus kernel. The project is linked to existing European efforts such as the Open Microprocessor Systems Initiative and High Performance Computing efforts.
