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2003 August...one cool evening. The Osiris Project was born inside (!!!) M. Aslam as a desire to write a JavaOS, that would eliminate the unwanted layers between a Java application and the hardware. He wanted platform independence in the true sense of the word. The idea was to take the next step in the 'Write Once Use Anywhere' philosophy, a Grand Unification Project, a world without nightmares of compatibilities, architectures, OSes, versions,.... :(. Days went on and he happened to discuss the concept with Jimmy and Sanjay. After the usual doubting of any great idea, the two joined the project...still a JavaOS with the provision to add any other byte code support. In the mean time we were lucky to enlist another member, Kumar. This was when one of the project members, Jimmy had an idea (rather extravagant) of creating an application oriented OS which could run any number of VMs, even those of other OSes. After a brief discussion with Aslam (who 2 harboured such an idea) the project made a quantum leap from being revolutionary to Herculean. It was decided to lay the framework for such an architecture and stick to implementing the JavaVM. The target hardware chosen was PC based on the P6 microarchitecture IA32 processors. Now coming to the basic form of the envisaged OS...it is a microkernel based design deviating from the more common monolithic kernels due to the nature of the system. This microkernel would work at the supervisor level. It would initialise the system and then carry basic process and memory management for the layers above. On top of this would be drivers and VMs running at a lesser priority than the µ-kernel...ensuring that even if some stupid VM broke your system (and other VMs) could run. Finally we would have the user processes running with least priority. Another advantage of not putting the VMs as user processes like some other µ-kernel based OSes do, is that we can extract the extra efficiency arising from giving VMs some privileged accesses. The processes (and threads) would be scheduled on a two level adaptive basis. This then is the arrival of a new kid on the block...Osiris
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