Thought Blog

Found some links to Microsoft's new research OS Singularity.

They recently released a technical report (PDF), which has some details on the internals.

They are trying to focus on "dependability" as their main focus of the design of the OS. They designed their own language "Sing#" based on C#.

In the first some pages, that write that they beleive they have conceived a more modern version of an "OS process" which they call as "Software Isolated Process(SIP)".

They decribe it as follows - I quote -

SIPs are the OS processes on Singularity. All code outside the kernel executes in a SIP. SIPs
differ from conventional operating system processes in a number of ways:

1. SIPs are closed object spaces, not address spaces. Two Singularity processes cannot
   simultaneously access an object. Communications between processes transfers exclusive
   ownership of data.
   
2. SIPs are closed code spaces. A process cannot dynamically load or generate code.
   
3. SIPs do not rely on memory management hardware for isolation. Multiple SIPs can reside
   in a physical or virtual address space.
   
4. Communications between SIPs is through bidirectional, strongly typed, higher-order
   channels. A channel specifies its communications protocol as well as the values
   transferred, and both aspects are verified.
   
5. SIPs are inexpensive to create and communication between SIPs incurs low overhead.
   Low cost makes it practical to use SIPs as a fine-grain isolation and extension
   mechanism.
   
6. SIPs are created and terminated by the operating system, so that on termination, a SIP’s
   resources can be efficiently reclaimed.
   
7. SIPs executed independently, even to the extent of having different data layouts, run-time
   systems, and garbage collectors.
   

I am not an OS expert, but it appears to me after reading some of their paper, that there may be some ingenious insights in their effort.

Looks like Microsoft Research, with their luminous research members, might be striking a resonance of the likes of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC of the old days. Had not heard of so many good researchers coming together at a place, and working on a "complete OS" research.