Windows Vista hasn't even been released yet and already Microsoft is releasing information on a new OS with absolutely no ties with "Windows", itÂ’s called "Singularity". That's right no more Windows. Singularity is a prototype of a microkernel based OS written with no roots in Windows made up of 300,000 lines of code all from scratch.
But the OS is currently written entirely in a combination of Microsoft's C# programming language, as well as a new version of C#, named "Sing#". MicrosoftÂ’s goal is to write the entire OS using only Sing#. The singularity team says that that Singularity is most likely to be found in the embedded OS space or the Server OS market.
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Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.
Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernelÂ’s address space.
Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader
http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/
But the OS is currently written entirely in a combination of Microsoft's C# programming language, as well as a new version of C#, named "Sing#". MicrosoftÂ’s goal is to write the entire OS using only Sing#. The singularity team says that that Singularity is most likely to be found in the embedded OS space or the Server OS market.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.
Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernelÂ’s address space.
Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader
http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/