HydrixOS

HydrixOS is a project that aims to develop a free operating system published under the GNU General Public License.

This free operating system aims to make it possible to integrate programs written for different platforms into one system such that programs can communicate and work together with programs of heterogeneous platforms without having to care about the differences of said platforms. To realize this the operating system will use a transparent communication protocol for its client-server interactions.

Classification

The new kernel of HydrixOS - called "hymk" - can now be described as a real microkernel. As a difference to other microkernel systems the IPC of the hymk doesn't contain system calls for transferring message data through the kernel. All data transferred between two processes are transferred by areas of shared memory. The kernel just provides system calls for connecting memory areas of two processes and it provides also functions to synchronize two threads. The developers of the "hymk" think that this mechanism will improve the performance of the whole system because there is no need for buffering message data in kernel mode.

State of development

The project restarted in September 2004 when the old system seemed to have a bad performance. The system had already a fully implemented VFS layer and a toolkit for service development. However the new microkernel "hymk" is already implemented as of December 2004. Currently the project tries to develop a concept for the userland implementation.Right now the development seems to have stopped but there are plans to reactivate HydrixOS with different goals.

External links

* [http://www.hydrixos.org/ English web site]
* [http://www.hydrixos.de/ German web site]