Vino (operating system)

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Vino was a now-inactive project at Harvard University that sought to develop an extensible-kernel operating system based on NetBSD.

Harvard University Private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with about 6,700 undergraduate students and about 15,250 postgraduate students. Established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning. Its history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities. The university is often cited as the world's top tertiary institution by most publishers.

NetBSD open-source Unix-like operating system

NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems.

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There is also a current project named Vino hosted on CodePlex that seeks to develop a Java-based operating system similar in concept to the legacy JavaOS.

CodePlex was a forge website by Microsoft. While it was active, it allowed shared development of open-source software. Its features includes wiki pages, source control based on Mercurial, Team Foundation Server (TFS), Subversion or Git, discussion forums, issue tracking, project tagging, RSS support, statistics, and releases.

JavaOS is an operating system with a Java virtual machine as a fundamental component, originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Unlike Windows, Mac OS, Unix, or Unix-like systems which are primarily written in the C programming language, JavaOS is primarily written in Java. It is now considered a legacy system.

Vino Group at Harvard

During the 1990s, a Vino Group within the Harvard School of Engineering worked to develop an "extensible" Unix-like operating system. According to the project's main web page:

Unix-like operating system that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell. There is no standard for defining the term, and some difference of opinion is possible as to the degree to which a given operating system or application is "Unix-like".

"The VINO OS project at Harvard is an extensible operating system. This means that application software, running with the privileges of an ordinary user, can provide extensions to operating system (specifically, operating system kernel) functionality. More importantly, this can be done both safely and reasonably securely, and also efficiently; efficiently enough to make it worthwhile". [1]

In essence, Vino was a fork of and ran on the same Intel 486 hardware platform as NetBSD did at that time. Two alpha versions of Vino were released (under a "BSD-like" license) — 0.40 in December, 1997, and 0.50 in December, 1998. That software and its companion documentation are currently available from the Systems Research at Harvard (SYRAH) Group, [2] which also maintains the Vino web pages.

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References

  1. ↑ "The VINO Operating System". Systems Research at Harvard Group. Retrieved 19 April 2013.
  2. ↑ "Systems Research at Harvard". Systems Research at Harvard Group.
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