[unios] Project update.

[Pieter Dumon]

> 
> I believe Beholder will be recieving this from the Unios at tunes.org list, The
> message is primarily to him but it concerns everybody. After much concideration
> I have decided to change tack on the entire project. The orrigional goal was a
> totally hardware independant software platform. I nolonger believe that this is
> fesable in the near term. 

It is not even necessary to make a complete hardware-independent software
platform. You can hide most hardware-specific things from the user, but at
least the supervisor must be able to do hardware settings and OS
optimizations. Also, it must be possible for programs to detect the number
of cpu's in the system etc. Like that, programs can easily define how to
divide the workload. The OS alone can't do that. Take an example to the
rc5 contest : you can run the client numbercrunchers with options on how
many cpus your computer has etc. Very effective. You don't need to hide
all hardware from the user - as long as it is safe. 

Also, it is not possible to make one environment that fits all needs. It's
just _impossible_. Graphical workstations need a completely other
environment than  webservers. But lots of software layers can be the same,
off course, and it can almost all be programmed hardware-independent.

> 	Where do we go from here? I believe that the best course of action at this time
> is to take Linux or OSKit and customize it so that it meets my definition of
> user friendly.

Taking the Linux kernel or the OSKit has nothing to do about making
something userfriendly, has it? These are low-level interfaces and only
need to be understandable by OS programmers. 
 

> To that end I will spend the next 6 months finally learning LiNuX
>  as it is today so I can start plan how to rewrite it. 

Is rewriting Linux just a good option? Linux takes a monolthic kernel
aproach. It is modular, so it is very flexible, but far to difficult to
get stable, due to the design. It is possible to make much more flexible
models. You could base that work on the Linux kernel, but generally,
you'll end up with more trouble than just to start from scratch (from
scratch means usign the OSKit , for instance)

> I will also start studying math in an attempt to come up with that new
> discovery! :)

:) Good luck.
Perhaps you'll end up with a completely new computing model. An
alternative to the Turing model or so...  

Pieter

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 Pieter.Dumon@rug.ac.be               
 pdumon@vtk2.rug.ac.be
                                     
 http://studwww.rug.ac.be/~pdumon     
 
 ICQ  : 12428974
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