Initial copies of the Open Software Foundation’s microkernel-based OSF/1 Release 1.3 operating system are due out in the second quarter of this year, Foundation officials said at the end of last month, with the third snapshot due out in March. Release 1.3 upgrades the OSF/1 microkernel base from Carnegie-Mellon’s Mach 2.5 to Mach 3.0, enhanced with Foundation code to make it industrial strength. Most significantly, R1.3 has progressed from the integrated kernel architecture of R1.2 to the decomposition of the core kernel and Unix services. R1.2 Unix semantics and R1.2 conformance, internationalisation and user environment are all retained, along with data capture interface and common data link interface standards for device drivers. In fact, OSF/1 Release 1.3 hosts the OSF/1 operating system as a personality in very much the same way that IBM Corp is planning to do in its forthcoming Workplace OS system. There, IBM will include both OS/2 and OSF/1 – rather than AIX personalities, giving the Foundation a much needed endorsement for its operating system technology, currently only taken up as a complete system only by Digital Equipment Corp. The Foundation says it has added lots of code to Carnegie Mellon’s Mach 3, and has now fully separated out the server code from the microkernel, a process that it began with OSF/1 1.2. And the Foundation clearly hopes that IBM’s use of the Mach 3.0 kernel within its future Taligent object-oriented operating system effort will give it a further endorsement – although Hewlett-Packard’s Bernard Guidon said that his company regarded Taligent Inc’s object frameworks and application development tools as more crucial – and independent from – the microkernel issue. OSF/1 1.3 – which in the dim and distant past used to be called OSF/2 – includes additional 64-bit support, and conforms to ANSI C, FIPS 151-1, Posix 1003.1 and 2, X/Open XPG4 and SPEC 1170 standards. Support for massively parallel systems and clusters is part of the on-going OSF/1-AD project. The Foundation is also somewhat nervously beginning to talk about OSF/1 1.4, which might include object-oriented frameworks and greater support for threads programming, but everything depends on what its members want it to do – something that is currently under discussion.
