Re: Operating System in Ada

Re: Operating System in Ada

[Corey Ashford]

> Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote in message <000301bdf6f6$9a9e5f60$1a404bd1@rleif>...
> From: Bob Leif
>
>To: the Readers of Comp.Lang.Ada
>
> The equivalent of an Ada operating system has already be done twice.
> Firstly, there was the BIIN project, which was in Ada. If any one can find
> the sources, it would be of interest to make them available. I suspect that
> if BIIN were hosted on a modern PC, that it might have reasonable
> performance. If the present POSIX.Ada '95 packages used with Linux were
> employed, it would be very interesting to run BIIN head to head against
> commercial operating systems like Windows NT.


Actually, BiiN was the name of the spin-off company from Intel and
Siemens.  The OS name was Osiris.  It was a monster object-oriented
OS.  It's not really comparable with NT in any sense.  It wasn't GUI
oriented at all.  It was aimed toward security, high-reliability, availability, and
fault-tolerance.  It had a lot of OO theory in it, but was fairly slow
because it was running on parallel 16 MHz i960 chips.

I believe that the code was put under lock-and-key by Siemens never to see
the light of day again because no buyer could be found for BiiN when Siemens
and Intel decided to call it quits on the deal.

It would have been a bear to port anyway as it relied on the "P7 Extended
Architecture" of the i960 that never really received much public description.
There were a lot of object oriented features built right into the processor -
which also required a 33-bit word (1 bit was used for tagging access
descriptors).

- Corey

Re: Operating System in Ada

[Jonathan Guthrie]

Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. <rleif@RLEIF.COM> wrote:
> The equivalent of an Ada operating system has already be done twice.

> Firstly, there was the BIIN project, which was in Ada.

<snippage>

> The second example is from the laboratory of N. Wirth, the grandfather of
> Ada '83 (Great-grandfather of Ada '95). Wirth et al. at ETH Z?rich have
> already created an operating system in Oberon.

Oberon is written in Oberon, not Ada.  Also, the Oberon system was
originally part of the language's run time system.  This turned out to be
an incredibly bad idea, so they created a standalone language system.
However, the Oberon system MUST be programmed in---wait for it---Oberon.
You CAN NOT program an Oberon system in Ada, so Oberon has nothing to do
with Ada.  So, Oberon is as much an example of an "equivalent of an Ada
operating system" as MS-DOS was.

Now, it has been pointed out that implementing an operating system in Ada
is kind of pointless if all you're trying to do is show that it can be
done.  On the other hand, if you like Ada and you've got some ideas for
how an OS should be done, then go for it.  (If you're looking for some
ideas, I've got some API descriptions kicking around that I can share
although I believe the Ada system takes care of essentially everything
that I've designed.)

Something you'll want to remember:  you're going to want to provide easy
support for languages other than Ada.  That means that you're going to
need C bindings for the CP (Control Program---MainframeSpeak for "kernel",
sort of) API at the very least.  (It would help if porting Unix or Win32 C
sources to this system is a simple matter of a recompile and relink.)  
That helps to prevent your system from becoming a mere curiousity.

Then, for that system to become popular, all you need is a pile of luck.
-- 
Jonathan Guthrie (jguthrie@brokersys.com)
Information Broker Systems   +281-895-8101   http://www.brokersys.com/
12703 Veterans Memorial #106, Houston, TX  77014, USA

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Re: Operating System in Ada

[Tom Moran]

Is there a description of Osiris conveniently available somewhere?

Re: Operating System in Ada

[Corey Ashford]

Tom Moran wrote in message <362630ef.143968@SantaClara01.news.InterNex.Net>...
>Is there a description of Osiris conveniently available somewhere?

Not that I'm aware of.  The project was shut down in 1990, so there's
probably little on the web.

You could try using a search engine like altavista and search for
"osiris AND (p7 OR i960) OR biin".  Search both the usenet and the web.
There might be some old usenet articles that would be of interest.

- Corey