Brad Appleton's Operating Systems Links

Last update: Thu Feb 26 16:29:12 CST 1998


Brad Appleton
Software Tools Developer
E-mail: brad@bradapp.net
WWW: www.bradapp.net/

322 links to Operating Systems on the World Wide Web.

Detailed Table of Contents


Operating Systems Resources

ACM SIGOPS
Chorus Technical Documentation
CMU Systems and Languages Overview
Microsoft Research Operating Systems Group
Microsoft Research Operating Systems Theory
The Open Group Research Institute
Operating Systems Research at U. AZ
OS News: Exploring the Future of Computing
OSU Free Operating Systems Users Group
Pthreads
Silvano's Hot Links
Showdown at the OS Corral - an OS comparison
Yahoo - Operating Systems

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Unix


Linux


MS Windows

GNU-WIN32 Project Page
The GNU-Win32 tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools to Windows NT/95 for the x86 and powerpc processors. Applications built with these tools have access to the Microsoft Win32 API as well as the Cygwin32 API which provides additional UNIX-like functionality including unix sockets, process control with a working fork and select, etc.
UNIX to NT Resource Center
This Resource Center contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), and a number of useful resources about how to port UNIX applications to Microsoft's Windows NT.
The Visual Collection - Windows Software Archive
UnixNT.COM - Unix/Windows-NT Integration
Windows Developer's Journal
UWIN- Unix for WINdows
The UWIN package provides a mechanism for building and running UNIX applications on Windows NT and Windows 95 with few, if any, changes necessary. The UWIN package contains the following three elements: Libraries that provide the UNIX Application Programming Interface (API); Include files and development tools such as cc, yacc, lex, and make; Korn Shell and over 160 utilities such as ls, sed, cp, stty etc.
Windows95.com - Windows 95 Web Site
Windows CE
Windows NT Magazine
Windows NT Workstation 4.0
The WinSite Archive
Windows95 Annoyances

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PalmTops

Apple's Newton Site
Aslan's Pilot PDA Links
Copilot Home Page
Jay's PalmPilot Web Sites
Newton MessagePad Reference
Newton Related Sites
PalmPilot Development Resources at RoadCoders
PalmPilotGear H.Q.
PalmPilot Resources & Software
The PalmPilot Page!!
pdantic.com - Resources for Handheld Computing
PDApage - Home page
Pilot Software Development
Pilot Software Development
Psion PLC
Scott's Pilot Page!!
The Airborne Palm-Pilot Page

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File/Storage Systems

Alex FTP Filesystem
Alex is a filesystem that lets users access files in FTP sites around the world just like they access local files. Alex pathnames are composed of 3 parts. First is /alex. Second is a reversed hostname. Last is the path on that host. For example, /alex/edu/berkeley/pub/virus.patch is a file at berkeley.edu.
CIFS - the Common Internet File System
Coda - an advanced network filesystem
Coda is an advanced networked filesystem. It has been developed at CMU during the last six years by the systems group of M. Satyanarayanan. in the SCS deparment.
Ext2fs - a structural analysis
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
This filesystem standard has been designed to be used by Unix distribution developers, package developers, and system implementors. However, it is primarily intended to be a reference and is not a tutorial on how to manage a Unix filesystem or directory hierarchy.
Macintosh NFS Client Project
Microsoft Research Scalable Servers
The Swarm Scaleable Storage System
The goal of the Swarm project is to design and implement a scalable network storage system based on a cluster of personal computers. Swarm is scalable because its performance is a function of the size of the cluster -- the more nodes in the cluster, the higher the system performance. This performance improvement is not merely an increase in aggregate performance, either; clients whose I/O performance is limited by the storage system will see an improvement in individual I/O operations if more storage servers are added. This decoupling of I/O performance from storage server performance allows the nodes of the cluster to be chosen to optimize cost-performance, rather than absolute performance -- the desired performance of the overall system is attained by aggregating enough nodes.
TCFS - the Transparent Cryptographic File System

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Other Operating Systems and Projects


Unix-like Systems

BSDI Home Page
Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) develops and markets high-performance Internet and networked server software for Internet service providers, corporate users, and embedded system vendors. BSDI delivers advanced server solutions powered by the mature, open BSD/OS networking and Internet technologies originally developed by the University of California Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG).
Digital Unix InfoCenter
FreeBSD Inc.
FreeBSD is an advanced BSD UNIX operating system for "PC-compatible" computers.
GNU Hurd
Linux Home Page
Minix on the Net
Minix, the book
The classic book on Operating systems design and implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum. This text introduced Minix to the world.
Minix info sheet
Minix is a free Uinix clone that is available with all the source code. Due to its small size, microkernel-based design, and ample documentation, it is well suited to people who want to run a Unix-like system on their personal computer and learn about how such systems work inside. It is quite feasible for a person unfamiliar with operating system internals to understand nearly the entire system with a few months of use and study. Minix has been written from scratch, and therefore does not contain any AT&T code--not in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, or the libraries. For this reason the complete source can be made available (by FTP or via the WWW).
MOSIX
MOSIX is kernel enhancements of BSDI's BSD/OS for cluster computing. It features dynamic load balancing and memory sharing for the efficient execution of sequential and parallel applications in a scalable cluster of PC's
NetBSD Project
The NetBSD Project is the collective volunteer effort of a large group of people, to produce a freely available and redistributable UNIX-like operating system, NetBSD. NetBSD is based on a variety of free software, including 4.4BSD Lite from the University of California, Berkeley. It runs on a large number of hardware platforms and is highly portable. It comes with complete source code, and is user-supported.
OpenBSD
The OpenBSD project involves continuing development of a free multi-platform 4.4BSD-based Unix-like operating system.
QNX
Sun's Solaris
UGU Unix Flavors

back to Other Operating Systems and Projects

Amoeba - a Distributed OS
Amoeba WWW Server
Apertos: the Reflective O-O OS
The Argon Project
The Be Operating System
The Calypso Project
Research in resource management in metacomputing environments for reliable high-performance computing. Current focus is on fault-tolerant and load-balanced parallel computing on COTS networks of COTS computers running COTS systems software At the core of the experimental platform lies an integrated set of simple techniques developed in previous foundational research, most notably the eager scheduling and the Two-Phase Idempotent Execution Strategy.
Calypso NT 1.0
The Choices Operating System
Choices is written as an object-oriented operating system in an object-oriented programming language C++. As an object-oriented operating system, its architecture is organized into frameworks of objects that are hierarchically classified by function and performance. The operating system is customized by replacing subframeworks and objects. The application interface is a collection of kernel objects exported through the application/kernel protection layer. Kernel and application objects are examined through application browsers. Choices runs on bare hardware on distributed and parallel computers. Virtual Choices (VChoices) also runs under UNIX System V.
Chorus/OS Product Family
Flux OS Project Home Page
The Flux Project's objectives are (i) to provide infrastructure (the "flux") for highly efficient component-based systems, with flexible degrees of inter-component trust, initially oriented to hardware-enforced protection; (ii) to provide transparent and flexible control of all the resources, including information, used by arbitrary subsystems; and (iii) to distribute free and usable versions of the developed software.
The Grasshopper Operating System
Despite the fact that the basic idea behind orthogonal persistence is very simple, research groups are finding it extremely hard to develop scalable and efficient persistent stores. One of the major difficulties derives from the fact that persistence provides a fundamentally different model of computing from that supported by conventional operating systems. It is therefore not surprising that we are finding that such operating systems are inappropriate for persistent systems research. In this project we are investigating the requirements of an operating system to support persistence and propose to design and construct a new operating system, known as Grasshopper, which has explicit support for persistent systems. This operating system will be implemented on standard workstation hardware.
Harmony Realtime OS
Harmony is a multitasking, multiprocessing operating system for realtime control, developed at the National Research Council to serve a need for a flexible system for realtime control of robotics experiments and for other applications of embedded systems where predictable temporal performance is a requirement. Harmony is extensible, configurable and portable, both across different target computers (typically assembled from single-board computers), and across different development hosts.
Helios
Helios is a micro kernel operating system for embedded and multiprocessor systems. The operating system is modular in design and can scale from an embedded runtime executive up to a fully distributed operating system.
The Horus Project
The Horus project has developed a modular and extensible process-group communication system, addressing the requirements of a wide variety of robust distributed applications.
Inferno, Lucent Technologies
Inferno(tm) is a new network operating system and programming environment to deliver content in a rich environment of heterogenous networks, clients and servers. The Inferno system includes the Inferno kernel, the Limbo(tm) programming language, reference APIs that include interfaces for networking and graphics, network protocols, security and authentication, and various toolkits. Inferno was developed by members of the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies.
JavaOS
Mach Project at CMU
MIT Exokernel Operating System
An operating system is interposed between applications and the physical hardware. Therefore, its structure has a dramatic impact on the performance and the scope of applications that can be built on it. Since its inception, the field of operating systems has been attempting to identify an appropriate structure: previous attempts include the familiar monolithic and micro-kernel operating systems as well as more exotic language-based and virtual machine operating systems. Exokernels dramatically depart from this previous work. An exokernel eliminates the notion that an operating system should provide abstractions on which applications are built. Instead, it concentrates solely on securely multiplexing the raw hardware: from basic hardware primitives, application-level libraries and servers can directly implement traditional operating system abstractions, specialized for appropriateness and speed.
MIT Multiscale Computing Project
Multiscale computing refers to the diverse set of computing environments that scale over a wide range of engineering parameters, including cost, size, power, and reliability. Unfortunately, the software problem for multiscale computing is compounded by this rich diversity of computing platforms, including networks of workstations, servers, multiprocessors, and MPPs. The goal of this project is to develop technologies necessary to unify computing across these different platforms.
The Oberon Home Page, ETH Zurich
Oberon is the name of a modern integrated software environment for single-user workstations. It includes a language in the Pascal / Modula tradition and a highly effective and compact operating platform.
OSKit
The OSKit is a framework and set of modularized library code together with extensive documentation. Its goal is to make it easier for OS developers to create a new OS; to run user code directly on the hardware, including programming language runtimes; to port an existing OS to a platform supported by the OS kit; or to enhance an OS to support a wider range of devices, file system formats, or executable formats. For example, we have taken the freely available Kaffe JVM and ported it to the OSKit, giving us a simple Java interpreter with access to the BSD networking stack and linux device drivers running on "bare hardware": a "Java Computer".
Paramecium
Paramecium is a simple and flexible (i.e. adaptable and extendable) operating system used to explore the tradeoffs between user processes and kernel boundaries. Services are provided by objects which are named in a per process name space. Each process may change its own name space, which boils down to installing new services, overriding or interposing existing services, etc. Through the use of code signing a user process may put objects into the kernel address space.
Plan 9
Plan 9 is a new computer operating system and associated utilities. It has been built over the past several years by the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the same group that developed Unix, C, and C++. Plan 9 is a distributed system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and CPU servers that provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways. These components are connected by various kinds of networks, including Ethernet, Datakit, specially-built fiber networks, ordinary modem connections, and ISDN. In typical use, users interact with applications that run either on their terminals or on CPU servers, and the applications get their data from the file servers, but it's also small enough to run by itself on a laptop. It is highly configurable; it escapes from specific models of networked workstations and central machine service.
Quarks
At Utah we are developing a freely-available distributed shared memory system named Quarks. Currently it consists of a user-level library and associated header files that support DSM on collections of Unix workstations.
Real-Time Mach
Scout: A Communications-Oriented OS
The Scout OS is A configurable communication-oriented operating system, targeted for network appliances, such as network cameras and disks, hand-held and portable devices, and multimedia workstations. Scout is based upon the concept of a path, which extends the network connection into the host OS. Scout makes the path its primary abstraction, with resource allocation, scheduling, optimizations, fault-isolation, and security done on a per-path basis.
the SkipOS Project
The SPACE Project
SPACE is an approach to operating systems which uses multiple protection domains rather than a single kernel to provide operating system services. Eliminating the monolithic kernel allows the operating system to be written as a set of cooperating application programs. This has a great impact on the extensibility and flexibility of the system. Multiple instances of fundamental paradigms, such as threads and virtual memory, can coexist, since they are implemented as applications code.
The SPIN Operating System
The Spring System.
The Spring Project at Sun Microsystems is investigating new technologies for constructing operating systems and for simplifying distributed programming. As part of this work, we have constructed the Spring distributed operating system. Spring is a highly modular, object-oriented operating system, which is focused around a uniform interface definition language. Spring is intrinsically distributed, with all system interfaces being accessible both locally and remotely.
The Synthetix Project at OGI
The Synthetix project (sponsored by ARPA, Intel, and HP) is investigating the application of a technique we call incremental specialization, a combination of fine-grain modularity and dynamic code generation, to create operating systems which are both highly modular and high-performance.
The Tao Operating System
The Totem System
The Totem system is a set of communication protocols to aid the construction of fault-tolerant distributed systems. The message ordering mechanisms provided by Totem allow an application to maintain the consistency of distributed and replicated information in the presence of faults.
The Transis Group Communication System Home Page
Transis is a group communication system that supports efficient group multicast for high availability.
The Tunes Project
Tunes is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethought Computing System, based on a correctness-proof-secure higher-order reflective self-extensible fine-grained distributed persistent fault-tolerant version-aware decentralized (no-kernel) dynamic high-level hardware-independent migratable yet (eventually) highly-performant object system
U-Net User-Level NIA
The U-Net User-Levl Network Interface Architecture provides low-latency and high-bandwidth communication over commodity networks for workstations and PCs. It achieves this by virtualizing the network interface such that every application can send and receive messages without operating system intervention.
Windows CE
x-kernel Home Page
The x-kernel is an object-based framework for implementing network protocols. It defines an interface that protocols use to invoke operations on one another (i.e., to send a message to and receive a message from an adjacent protocol) and a collection of libraries for manipulating messages, participant addresses, events, associative memory tables (maps), threads, and so on.

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