Speaking at a Unix Labs Pacific System Software Technology Seminar held recently in Tokyo, Michael Miracle, the director of the Unix System Development Department at Unix System Laboratories Inc in New Jersey and the person responsible for the developmet and testing of the System V.4 ES/MP release, said that Unix Labs was currently involved in internal debate and discussion with customers about the release of a microkernel-based version of System V.4. He was not currently ready to commit that the release after System V.4 ES/MP would be a microkernel-based one. The decision to go ahead or not would be based on a business assessment of the development costs against potential revenue, and the decision would be strongly influenced by customer input. While Unix Labs’s value-added reseller and equity relationship with Chorus Systemes SA has prompted speculation that the Chorus microkernel would be used as a matter of course, Miracle said that in the US, and certainly in government circles, Carnegie Mellon University’s Mach was a popular choice. Other issues being considered for inclusion in future versions of Unix System V included object-orientation, where Unix System Labs was looking at Choices from the University of Illinois and ISIS, a product for virtual synchronisation from Cornell University – these technologies are needed for distributed systems. Unix Labs is also examining object-oriented frameworks for coarse-grained serverising of ES/MP. Miracle was to go from Tokyo on to China, where he said that there was a lot of interest in Unix and Unix Labs’s work.
