The Open Software Foundation has had second thoughts about how soon features such as symmetrical multi-processing and improved security should be included within its operating system environment, and is now planning to include those features in OSF/1, due out next year. The Foundation is currently investigating the feasibility of incorporating technology from Carnegie-Mellon’s Mach operating system for integration with the almost finished operating system component based on IBM’s AIX 3.0 kernel. The move was prompted by discussions that began at the mid-May Foundation meeting held in Monte Carlo, where members expressed the feeling that such features were too important to be held back until the second release of the OSF Unix environment, which is unlikely to surface until late 1991. According to the Foundation’s director of European operations, Henning Oldenburg, AIX 3.0 as delivered from IBM consisted of 1.8m lines of code. From that it removed the IBM-specific code, and is currently in the process of adding the Mach memory management code. The new features would require the replacement of another 55,000 lines of code, said Oldenburg. The Foundation is currently evaluating its options, and will report to members at a Boston meeting between November 6 and 10. If the Foundation takes code direct from Carnegie-Mellon, the final scheduled release for OSF/1 mid-1990 – might have to be put back. However, said Oldenburg, the possibility of taking more developed code from companies that have already worked on Mach, such Encore Computer, NeXT or Sequent Computer Systems might speed the process up, he said. Members will vote on which course to take at the meeting. Oldenburg said it was unclear at present when the first version of the OSF Developers Kit, due out at the end of October, would now be released.
