Object Oriented Operating Systems

• Apertos (Sony Computer Science Lab)
• Choices (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  Choices is written as an object-oriented operating system in 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
• Grasshopper (University of Sydney) Group Members
  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. 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.
• GUIDE
  Guide (Grenoble Universities Integrated Distributed Environment) is an object-oriented distributed operating system for the development and operation of distributed applications on a local area networks connecting workstations and servers. Guide is a joint project of Bull and the IMAG Research Institute (Universities of Grenoble), which have created the Bull-IMAG joint Research Laboratory. It also has strong links with the COMANDOS Esprit Project (Construction and Management of Distributed Open Systems) and the BROADCAST Esprit Basic Research project.
• Mach at OSF (OSF Research Institute)
  Related to: Mach
  The OSF Research Institute is using the Mach technology started at CMU and is using it as the basis for several areas of research, including operating systems for parallel machines, trusted object-oriented kernels, and other OS research areas.
• Mach-US (Carnegie Mellon University)
  Related to: Mach
  The Mach-US system is an OS developed as part of the CMU MACH project. It is comprised of a set of servers, each of which supports orthogonal system services. For example, instead of one server supplying all of the system services as under the Mach BSD4.3 single server (UX), the Mach Multiserver (Mach-US) has several servers: a task server, a file server, a tty server, an authentication server, a network server, etc. It also has and emulation library that is mapped dynamically into each user process, and uses the system servers to support the application programmers interface (API) of the UNIX operating system.
• Merlin (University of Sao Paulo)
  An object-oriented, reflective operating system based on the Self programming language
• MetaOS (University of Victoria)
  MetaOS is an object-oriented system model, based on meta-levels, meta-spaces, meta-objects, and meta-interfaces, that allows applications to securely customize their run-time environment on the fly. Furthermore, it allows applications to share customizations with other applications, allows different types of security schemes to be implemented, and permits secure, remote troubleshooting of software.
• Mungi (University of New South Wales)
  A new operating system based on a single, flat virtual address space, orthogonal persistence, and a strong but unintrusive protection model.
• Paramecium
  This kernel uses an object-based software architecture which together with instance naming, late binding and explicit overrides enables easy reconfiguration. Determining which components are allowed to reside in the kernel address space is up to a certification authority or one of its delegates. These delegates may include validation programs, correctness provers, and system administrators. The main advantage of certifications is that it can handle trust and sharing in a non-cooperative environment.
• PEACE (Process Execution And Communication Environment) (GMD FIRST)
  PEACE is a family of operating systems with a truly object-oriented design developed at GMD FIRST. Emphasis is laid on subjects as performance, configurability and portability. It is the native operating system for the MANNA computer, a massively parallel computer facilitating a high-performance interconnection network. Ports to SunOS, FreeBSD and Parix were made and expand the scope of this system to other parallel computers as well as to workstation networks.
• Spring System (Sun)
  Sun's new research kernel. 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.
• Tigger (Trinity College Dublin) Group Members
  The Tigger project is developing a framework for the construction of a family of distributed object-support platforms suitable for use in a variety of distributed applications ranging from embedded soft-real time systems to concurrent engineering frameworks. Customisability, extensibility and portability are put forward as the way to handle diversity and are thus the core design goals in Tigger.
• Tornado (University of Toronto)
  Tornado is a new operating system being developed for the NUMAchine that addresses NUMA programming issues using novel approaches, some of which were developed for our previous operating system Hurricane. Tornado uses an object-oriented, building block approach that allows applications to customize policies and adapt them to their performance needs. For research purposes, we intend to tune Tornado for applications with very large data sets that typically do not fit in memory and hence have high I/O demands. We also intend to provide applications with an operating environment that provides predictable performance behavior to allow performance tuning and to allow the application to appropriately parameterize its algorithms at run-time.
• TUNES Group Members
  Tunes is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethough Computing System, based on a correctness-proof-secure higher-order reflective self-extensible fine-grained distributed persistent fault-tolerant version-aware decentralized (no-kernel) object system. We want to implement such a system because we know all these are required for the computing industry to compete fairly, which is not currently possible. Even if Tunes itself does not become a world-wide OS, we hope the TUNES experience can speed up the appearance of such an OS that would fulfill our requirements.