The revised plans for the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 operating system have now emerged more clearly from the frantic activity of the last few weeks. The new plan – made in response to member requests for the inclusion of symmetrical multi-processing and B1 level security – is for OSF/1 to become generally available in November 1990, although preliminary versions will begin filtering through to members from January of next year, under the Foundation’s snapshot programme. An early version of OSF/1 has been demonstrated, running on a RISC workstation. As reported, the revised OSF/1 will use Mach kernel technology from Carnegie Mellon, together with symmetrical multi-processing and parallel computing enhancements from Encore Computer Corp. Alongside will be significant portions of IBM’s AIX operating system, networking Streams technology from Mentat Inc, and the BSD 4.4 network file system code from the University of California at Berkeley. The aim is to create an operating system composed of modular elements with a small secure micro-kernel, a set of extensible server processes and transparent shared libraries for backward compatibility. And the move away from any dependence on AT&T code is highlighted in the latest set of written material from the Foundation, which avoids any mention of the Unix trademark throughout, and therefore does not have to credit AT&T as the trademark holder. The Mentat contribution will be its Portable Streams Environment software, a fully compatible superset of AT&T Streams which is also available for other environments, including VAX/VMS, Novell’s NetWare 386 and intelligent network boards, with OS/2 and other operating system implementations in progress. Over and above Streams as implemented in Unix V.3, Portable Streams Environment supports fully asynchronous input-output, and scheduling and synchronisation mechanisms that, according to the company allow real-time and multiple CPU operating systems to exploit Streams capabilities more fully. The product was developed entirely from AT&T’s publicly available Streams specifications. The new plan means that the Foundation will be in a competitive position with AT&T’s Unix System V.4.1 (the secure version) and V.4.2 (the multi-processing version) by the end of 1990. There is apparently some question among Foundation members as to whether the description of the two next releases of AT&T Unix have changed over the last months, and whether these versions were once called Unix System V.5. The forthcoming Unix roadmap expected from Unix International should finally set this in concrete. According to an Hewlett-Packard spokesman, there was a lot of fear after the Foundation’s Monte Carlo meeting in May that it would take two years to complete OSF/1, because of the AIX problem. But intensive work since then has cut the timescale down to this latest schedule. Because of press reports that Hewlett wants to get out of the Foundation, the company has been getting a stream of calls from other members asking whether it it is true. Hewlett said it would like to squash the rumours, but without disrupting the peace talks now in progress. According to Glen Osaka, manager of Open Systems Software Planning, Hewlett still prefers the notion of OSF/1 over System V.4 because of the modularity of the kernel, which enables different parts to be selected for different applications. John Abbott
