Swearing that the deck isn’t stacked in favour of Chorus Systemes SA’s offering, Unix International Inc has assembled a Kernel Architecture Work Group including Amdahl Corp, Bellcore Technologies, Fujitsu Ltd, Hal Computer Systems Inc, Intel Corp, Locus Computing Corp, Motorola Inc, NCR Corp, NEC Corp, the Open Systems Standards Institute, Oracle Corp, Sequent Computer Systems Inc, Tandem Computers Inc, Unisys Corp and of course Chorus. The Open Software Foundation and its sponsors IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp have also been invited to participate. Academics from Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, New York, Stanford, California at Los Angeles, Yale Universities and the UK’s University of Newcastle, all active in microkernel research, will provide input and review the work. Unix International president Peter Cunningham said that in plotting the architectural direction of Unix for the mid-1990s the group will consider a number of object-oriented and microkernel technologies including Amoeba and Mach. It seems there might be a move afoot to align the internal interfaces of Mach and Chorus and bring some compatibility to the microkernels. The work group needs to address issues of time-to-market, potential to add value, parallelisation, distributed nodal architecture, fault tolerance, high availability, interoperability, performance, reliability, scalability and serviceability. The group’s timetable calls for it to hand back its requirements to Unix International by July.
