FW: The OSKit 0.96 is released

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lepreau [mailto:lepreau@cs.utah.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 1998 9:02 AM
To: oskit-notify@fast.cs.utah.edu
Subject: The OSKit 0.96 is released

Go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/
and follow your nose for all the goodies.

Briefly: it's up to 30 component libraries now, comes with 45 example
mini-kernels, a 500 page (help!) document with few blank pages anymore
(although still lots of gaps in it), can be configured with full
multithreading and Posix threads, has prototype CPU inheritance scheduling
in it (5 policies including 2 real time), has a hierarchical network
link-sharing component, has a "simple virtual memory" component including
pageout. Has most Linux and BSD filesystems, several networking libs, the
full FreeBSD C library (which means most of Posix), lots of device drivers
(perhaps 60), profiling support, and some minimal video and window manager
support. A currently inelegant but useful component lets you run many
kernels on Unix in user-mode, which is great for debugging. Most components
now use the COM object model, which is a first in internal OS design.

Just about every component is optional, and unlike any other OS, is designed
to fit into *other* operating systems and environments if desired. Of
course the OSKit's got problems, too, don't we all. There are a ton of
things that it needs. One nice thing in that regard is that it's easy to
incrementally add to the OSKit. Let's do it!

Re licensing, the OSKit comes with full source, and is GPL'ed; "open
source" is now the "in" term apparently. If a business or someone has
trouble with the GPL, the University is willing to talk about other options.

As a special holiday bonus-- for such patience on your part-- this release
supports a version, which we provide, of the Kaffe OpenVM (Java to you) from
Transvirtual. Thus you can link them together and you've got Kaffe on the
bare HW, or with a configuration change, you can run the same "Java OS" on
top of Unix. Our Kaffe changes will go into the next beta release.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson and his company for giving Kaffe to the world.

We are grateful to the long line of free software projects from whom we drew
code, including Mach, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and XFree86. The GNU build
tools were, as always, invaluable. DARPA's support has been great.

Finally, I want to thank and acknowledge the fine team at Utah that has
accomplished so much, and with whom I have the honor to work. Check out
the CREDITS file for their names.

------
Notes:

Surprising stuff: five hours after he pulled down the release, Matthew
Flatt,
a grad student at Rice who had never before seen the OSKit got a "Scheme
computer" running. You can see his mail in the oskit-users mail archives
off
the Web address above.

This message goes to all of you who sent mail to the oskit-notifyme
address, asking to be notified when a release was made.

Mailing lists: we have added all of you to the general list
"oskit-users@cs.utah.edu". If you prefer only to be on the oskit-announce
list (a superset of oskit-users for major announcements only), send mail to
"oskit-users-request@cs.utah.edu" asking to be moved. Don't send to the
oskit-notify address in the above mail header: it will disappear shortly.

We and oskit-users would appreciate knowing of whatever use you make of the
OSKit. Be sure to send feedback, especially improvements or suggestions for
them, to the docs or code. Thanks...

Jay Lepreau
University of Utah
lepreau@cs.utah.edu
Received on Wed Dec 23 05:06:00 1998