Microsofts another operating system Helios emerged

Posted by admin

September 29, 2009

When we just kept Microsoft’multikernel OS-Barrelfish in mind last week.The giant again reveals another OS,codenamed Helios.Helios is a heterogeneous multiprocessing platform built around satellite kernels.It can trace back to Singularity.

Microsoft researchers have written a 14-page paper on Helios. The research paper describes the operating system as follows:

“Helios is an operating system designed to simplify the task of writing, deploying, and tuning applications for heterogeneous platforms. Helios introduces satellite kernels, which export a single, uniform set of OS abstractions across CPUs of disparate architectures and performance characteristics. Access to I/O services such as file systems are made transparent via remote message passing, which extends a standard microkernel message-passing abstraction to a satellite kernel infrastructure. Helios retargets applications to available ISAs by compiling from an intermediate language.”

Developers have modified Singularity RDK to support satellite kernels, remote message passing and affinity. Satellite-kernel supports two different hardware platforms: an Intel XScale programmable PCI Express I/O card and cache-coherent NUMA architectures. Helios “treats programmable devices as part of a ‘distributed system in the small,’” according to Microsoft’s description, and “is inspired by distributed operating systems such as LOCUS, Emerald and Quicksilver.”

Helios,Barrelfish and another unkown OS are complementary.

“Barrelfish focuses on gaining a fine-grained understanding of application requirements when running applications, while the focus of Helios is to export a single-kernel image across heterogenous coprocessors to make it easy for applications to take advantage of new hardware
platforms.”

In a word,Singularity,Midori,Barrelfish and Helios are just research program,which cant become Windows.If techonogy is mature,it is merged into the whole Windows.

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