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ISI, Mitsubishi to Develop New Operating System

Posted by Roblimo on from the anything's-better-than-wince dept.

Richard Finney writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Integrated Systems Inc. and Mitsubishi are teaming to create a new operating system in a Yahoo! News story here. The OS will be for new, portable gadgets that will feature high-speed Internet access."

2 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. No, No, We VERY MUCH NEED New OS Designs by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 3
    If you look back at the last ten years, there has been the anomaly of there being only a small amount of real progress in the development of operating systems.

    Twenty years ago, there were a goodly number of derivatives of Multics as well as attempts at "truly new" stuff like Hydra on their way.

    In the '90s, the only alternatives anyone has had any "faith" in have been Windows NT, and, in the last year, Linux. I would contend that this has been the result of

    • A concerted attempt by MSFT to buy out the OS research groups,
    • The failure of IBM's "WorkPlace OS" project, which is related insofar as it was based on Mach, and MSFT offered Rashid, the Mach architect, "too much to pass up," and
    • Related to both of the above, a conscious attempt by MSFT to convince the marketplace that the future would involve "Windows Everywhere."
    • Add in the factor that there used to be sizable projects that combined academic, government, and corporate funds to produce public goods, as resulted in such things as X, BSD 386, CMU Lisp, and Andrew, that don't seem to be continuing to be sponsored
    And you get the situation where it looked like the world might conceivably be "Windows Anywhere."

    The way we get improvements, in the long run, is by trying a diverse set of different things. Linux is not appropriate everywhere, and we may find, out of some alternative OS research, the successor that will be so much better that it can ultimately replace Linux for "general purpose" applications.

    Furthermore, there are more kinds of applications out there than merely those for which the "big server" that Linux is ideal for.

    • For high security applications, the models provided by the UNIX security model are starting to show creakiness.

      Experimentation with capability-based systems is needed to figure out how to build more secure systems.

    • For very small embedded systems, Linux is simply too big.

      Cygnus' ECOS has a kernel that can be configured as small as a couple of kilobytes.

      It may be amazing enough that you can boot Linux on a PalmPilot; that doesn't mean that it is actually useful to do so.

      If I wanted to build something to fit in 2MB of RAM and some smaller amount of ROM, I'd not pick Linux.

    The world will be served by allowing Linux to be replaced by a set of OSes that are better, once such systems can mature into usefulness.

    Remember also that Linux may be legitimately regarded as being merely a kernel.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  2. More links by grungeKid · · Score: 3

    ISI Releases Net Device Reference Design
    Trio seeks to jump-start Java-based PDAs

    It looks like a cool system... and before you moan about it being java based and therefore intrinsically slow, remember that java was originally based for appliances like settop boxes and handhelds. They're partnering with Espial for java class libraries, and Espial has done some great java libraries with a very small footprint. Will be interesting to see if it will be interoperable with the Palm + KJava