OS News Archive

At the last USENIX VMware and XenSource finally agreed to work on a joint project for hypervisor standardization, coordinated by Rusty Russell, Linux kernel hacker working for IBM Linux Technology Center, and called paravirt-ops. But VMware doesn't want to give up its own standardization implementation, VMI, and today released by surprise a working version of its Player able to run para-virtualized Linux distributions over a VMI compliant engine.

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

Asbestos, a new prototype operating system, provides labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws. Applications can express a wide range of policies with Asbestos's kernel-enforced label mechanism, including controls on inter-process communication and system-wide information flow. A new event process abstraction provides lightweight, isolated contexts within a single process, allowing the same process to act on behalf of multiple users while preventing it from leaking any single user's data to any other user. Initial tests have been promising, and Eddie Kohler, Asbestos's creator, hopes that within a few years, Asbestos will be an alternative to server operating systems such as Linux and Windows.

The FreeDOS kernel originally produced by Pat Villani and what we consider today to be the full featured operating system "FreeDOS" by Jim Hall and is currently maintained by the FreeDOS team, including many third party contributors. It's first goal was to create a full featured MS DOS clone but it has extended beyond this with features like "out of the box" networking support.

"What follows is meant to be a hands-on introduction to system programming, using C and the Sartoris microkernel. Knowledge of the C programming language is assumed. This tutorial should have you writing, compiling and booting several little programs presto. In order to do this, you will need access to a *nix system and development tools. Linux is what we use over here, but if you are a windows user, Cygwin will do as well."

GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

Red Hat and Novell, the two top Linux sellers, have only just begun building Xen virtualization software into their products. But they're already planning to add a higher-level option. Xen is a 'hypervisor' that lets a single computer run several operating systems simultaneously, using an idea called 'virtualization'. This enables companies to use a single server more efficiently - something that could save them money. Now 'containers', a higher-level virtualization approach that makes a single operating system look like many, is also getting traction.

Virtualisation start-up XenSource next week will begin selling its first product, XenEnterprise, chief executive Peter Levine said on Thursday in the US.

OneStat today reported that Microsoft's Windows dominates the operating system market with a global usage share of 96.97 percent. The Mac appears to be at around 2.47% and Linux at 0.36%. Please note that OneStat bases its numbers on a large number of internet site hits and extraction from user agents.

" a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions." Read more at Slashdot.

"All of you who are reading this article right now are doing so with the help of an operating system. Of course, if you're reading it on paper, then that you may not think that that's the case, although it had to be printed by a printer that was connected to a computer which was operated by an operating system, right? In a way, it's like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. When you get right down to it, operating systems are a major part of our connected lives since something is needed to manage and execute all of the actions that take place on the electronic devices that we love oh so very much."

In the effort of maintaining Mac market dominance, Parallels virtualization firm already started a new beta cycle of its popular Desktop and reveals virtualization.info a major product: Parallels Server for Mac OS. In the meantime Microsoft killed its Mac VirtualPC and VMWare announced its new Mac product.

In all appearance of an ad-supported operating system is probably not that far off. This article takes a look at some of the finer points behind an OS which is financed with ad views, and more specifically the logic behind a free version of Windows which could make this a reality. There are a few issues which must be resolved first, but with Microsoft refining Windows Live and shifting some of their focus to advertising, many of the pieces seem to be falling into place. A few years ago we featured an editorial and poll on the subject here at OSNews.

"Two weeks ago Microsoft and XenSource announced an agreement to grant interoperability of virtual machines on upcoming Windows Server Virtualization and XenEnterprise virtualization platforms. The move raised the attention of the whole IT world, involving license, support, security, and performance issues. Virtualization.info interviewed both companies to understand the details of the agreement and shed light on what customers can expect from the Microsoft hypervisor release."