SunSoft Inc will add another piece of technology from its hush- hush Spring project to the next release of Solaris as Spring Doors, a low-level Inter Process Communication system that reduces the time that services (and objects) take to communicate with each other across the operating system, from milliseconds to microseconds. Spring Doors is imperative for handling the amount of traffic that will be generated by Distributed Object Environment, OpenStep and other object-based services being implemented on Solaris, said SunSoft vice-president of technology development Steve McKay. Spring Doors works at a lower level, but will also boost the speed of SunSoft’s existing ToolTalk inter-application messaging services, he said the layer that developers typically write to. Spring Doors is part of a rolling programme to integrate Spring components into Solaris. What we will not be seeing any time soon, McKay said, is a microkernel implementation of Solaris. Indeed SunSoft rejects altogether the kind o f microkernel-driven multiple personality environments envisioned by IBM Corp and others. Moreover, McKay said SunSoft is already adding the kind of modular functionality to Solaris that is attributed to microkernel implementations, such as the ability to create transferable device driver components. These, and many other services will be spun out of the Solaris 2.5 kernel as component services, McKay said. Meantime, the company says it is not sure when it will get Solaris up to full compliance with X/Open Co Ltd’s Unix 95 (Spec 1170) specification. It claims to be 96% or 97% of the way there, but is not committing to delivering full functionality even in Solaris 2.5, which is due in the autumn, saying it may have to wait for a subsequent release. It has no name change planned.
